“Perfect timing,” she said when I got her on her cell. “I’m like ten minutes out of Greenfield. Why don’t you start down? I’ll make us some dinner and you can stay over. Or we could go out.”
“I think I better pass,” I said. “I got some guy coming around to interview first thing in the morning.”
“So how about if I come up? Since I’m already on the road. I don’t have class till tomorrow afternoon. Is there any food in the house?”
“You must be whipped, though.”
“I’m buzzed, actually—I stopped at a Starbucks. So did the thing go all right? Your friend?”
“It wasn’t my favorite day. How was Boston?”
“Fine, except I missed you. I’ll stop and pick us up something.”
“I don’t know how the roads are going to be. It’s cold as hell up here.”
“Oh, pish tush,” she said. “Nothing can daunt a Subaru girl.”
By the time I saw her headlights coming up the drive, I’d brought in wood for the night, I had the Jack Daniel’s rolling and I’d dropped a blue pill and could feel my face starting to get red. I didn’t always take one, but I was fifty-nine and she was forty-four, I’d worked all day, had plenty on my mind and I had to admit I was pissed that she hadn’t wanted to hear me when I was giving her hint after hint, not pissed pissed but annoyed. When she got out of the car I saw her breath smoking. I went out onto the porch; she stuck her tongue in my mouth and I took the canvas grocery bag and her suitcase.
“Nice and toasty in here,” she said when I shut the door behind us. She tossed her coat down and she was on me again. “See, I did miss you. So I brought scallops. And chives, and ginger. I know you have rice. I’m going to make us something healthy. If I know you, you’ve been eating crap all weekend. What are we drinking?”
“Just having my usual,” I said.
“Is that vodka still there? I’ll get it, I have to go make my preparatory preparations.”
I picked up her coat off the floor and hung it on the coat tree, then sat on the sofa. “You need to get a gas stove,” she called from the kitchen. “How can you cook on this thing? And a decent refrigerator.” She came back with a glass of vodka and ice, put her knees over the arm of the sofa and rested her head in my lap. I smoothed her bangs away from her wide forehead; her face looked strange upside down.
“You seem like you had a good time,” I said.
“It’s always a little painful to go back.” She raised her head to take a sip, then eased it down again. “But I got to see a couple of people, and they were showing Out of the Past at the Brattle. Have you seen that? You have to see it. Oh, and I went and revisited the Monet haystack—I know, I’m such a cliché. Anyway, thanks for letting me come up. I really didn’t want to go back to the hellhole tonight.” Her apartment in Greenfield was in a turn-of-the-century building on Main Street, above the stationery store. She’d fixed it up with white particle-board cubes for bookcases and good rugs and painted the walls sky blue and hung a Star of Texas quilt over her bed. But yes.
“I thought it was all about me,” I said.
“Oh, it will be. Do you want to get fed before or after? Or before and after?”
“You mean you want after.”
“Oh, my.” She leaned her head farther back to look upside down in my eyes. “Is it that effortful?”
“It’s been a shitty few days,” I said. “I’m losing people.”
“Who are you losing? Not me.”
“At work.”
“Ah,” she said. “Construction and its discontents.”
“One of them used to take class with you. Amber Sibley?”
“Oh God, all the Ambers and Crystals and Tiffanys. She probably hates me, right? I don’t mean to be a terrible person. I just feel they’re all so sunk. Like, submerged. You want to weep. There isn’t any light there.” She took another sip, a bigger one. “They’re the same age as Everett, some of them.” This was the son who was in Europe, living in fucking hostels. I guess he could have been some shining spirit and not just another privileged twerp. Like me at that age.
“So maybe you shouldn’t be teaching them,” I said.
“I try to like my life,” she said. “I really do.” I heard the ice cubes knock against her teeth. “So are you going to be able to find other people?”
“I don’t want to worry about it now.” With her head in my lap and the blue pill starting to work, I could feel myself growing. I liked that her jeans were tight on her thighs and I wormed my hand down between where it was warm. She clamped my hand down harder and I thought I’d be able to get the job done. “You want to have the next one upstairs? I don’t know how warm it is up there.”
“Then you must have a short memory,” she said. She went into the kitchen for refills, switching her ass like she was making fun of me. I put more wood in the stove and followed her up the stairs, my four fingers between where the thighs met, squeezing, my thumb poking where her butthole would be. She stopped, eased back into it and said, “I like the way you think.”
I shoved her into the bedroom, making her spill her drink; she tossed down what was left and sat on the bed. I drank mine in one gulp, pushed her onto her back and she bounced up again and slapped me, which was how we generally got started. But I felt my hard-on going away. Construction and its discontents—she just had to be snotty. I watched her unzip her jeans and begin working them off and I noticed welts along her big white thighs from the seams. I yanked them off the rest of the way, socks inside, and got my mouth down where her underpants were already wet. She tasted sour. She twisted out from under and tried to get at the top button of my jeans and I pushed her away and slapped her good. “No,” she said. “I want that.”
If she’d just let me go down on her I might be able to get it back, or else she might come a couple times and maybe I’d be off the hook. I grabbed at the underpants and she clawed my arms, still within the rules, but instead of wrestling her down or whatever I was supposed to do, I got up off the bed and just stood there. “Fine,” I said. “Knock yourself out.”
I let her unzip me, she slid her hand down in, then looked up at me. She did have that pretty face. “Poor baby,” she said. “Okay, I know how to fix this. Get those off and lie back down.”
This time I hit her hard.
“What the fuck are you doing?” She put a hand to her jaw. “That’s not cool. I think you hurt me.”
“I am going to hurt you,” I said.
“Okay, stop. This is scaring me a little.”
“Maybe you better get out.”
She got up, took my arm and kissed where she’d scratched me. I pushed her back down. “What’s going on with you?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just not into it.”
“You mean tonight? Or anymore?”
“Christ,” I said. “Is it going to be that conversation?”
“Oh. Wow. Then I guess there’s my answer. So how long—no, actually I don’t need to know.” She found her socks, pulled them on and stood up to get into her jeans. “Here’s one thing about me, I make a clean exit. You don’t have to worry about hysterical phone calls.”
“Wait,” I said. “We’re really doing this?”
“Apparently there isn’t any ‘we,’ ” she said. “Why have I not learned this by now?”
—
I finally had to take a couple of Advil PMs on top of the Jack Daniel’s to get myself to sleep, and when I made it down to the kitchen in the morning I dry heaved at the smell of the scallops, which were still out on the counter. It was cold downstairs, but there wasn’t time to load the stove or make coffee—Amber would have some on, in the newly clean coffeemaker—or to shower or shave. If this guy did show up for an interview, it wouldn’t hurt for him to see me looking like a hard-ass. I stuck a PowerBar in my jacket pocket, put on my gloves and went out to start the truck and scrape frost off the windshield. Thermometer said three above. This would probably be the last cold snap, and then everybody’s fucking lawns would start greening up.