No. Moving to Pomo hadn’t finished us. The miscarriage had done that. The miscarriage and the part of Eva I’d never been able to reach.
The women in and out of my life — that was another reason for the restlessness, the dissatisfaction. Eva. And Storm after Eva was gone. And the hollow series of brief flings and one-night stands after it ended with Storm. And now Audrey and the uncertain feelings I had for her. Once I’d been so sure of what I wanted from a woman and a relationship. Not anymore. I wasn’t sure of much of anything anymore.
Midlife crisis? Call it that, or whatever. At thirty-seven I was starting to drift, to go through the motions. If I didn’t do something about it, get down inside myself and find some direction again, I’d wind up a nonalcoholic version of Douglas Kent — a scooped-out, burned-out mass filling up time and space while he waited for the hearse to come and haul him away.
After supper I tried reading and I tried watching TV. Mack whining to go out gave me something else to do for a while. I put the leash on him and walked him down by the lake, a good, long, brisk walk even though the temperature had dropped into the forties. Mack liked the cold; it made him frisky. Big old black Lab with a sweet disposition — a better friend than any human I knew in Pomo, with the possible exception of Audrey. I’d bought him for Eva after the miscarriage, a misguided attempt to fill some of the emptiness. Instead, she’d resented him — he was alive and her baby wasn’t — and had refused to have anything to do with him. Tried to get me to give him away, and when I wouldn’t do it, because I needed Mack even if she didn’t, she withdrew even more.
Withdrawal was her way of coping. From me, from the life we’d had, from the fact that she couldn’t have any more children. When her body was healed she wouldn’t let me touch her. Couldn’t stand to have me touch her anymore, she said. She’d always been religious; she withdrew into religion. Hours spent reading the Bible, praying aloud. Two, three, four days a week away from home doing church work. Six months of this, and then one day she was gone — moved out, moved back to Monterey to live with her mother. Saved herself and left me alone to find some other way to save myself. It hurt then and it still hurt now, after four years — a dull ache that came and went, came and went. The last I’d heard, five months ago through an old family friend, she was in a religious retreat somewhere near San Luis Obispo. One of us, at least, had found an answer.
The long walk tired me but did nothing for the restlessness. I called the station to see how things were. Verne Erickson, the night man in charge — actually, he’s a lieutenant and second in command; he works nights by choice — said things were relatively quiet. One D&D arrest, one minor traffic accident out on the Northlake Cutoff, nothing else so far. So I didn’t even have an excuse to go back to work.
I made a cup of cocoa, sprinkled nutmeg on top the way Eva had in the early days of our marriage. One of our little rituals: a cup of cocoa before bed every night that I managed to make it home by bedtime. It’d been good with us in those days... hadn’t it? Good, yes, but even then there’d been a distance between us. Less passion, sexual and otherwise, than I would’ve liked. Less connection on important issues. She wanted children, and her job at a day-care center in Carmel Valley only made her want them more. I was ambivalent, and at some level I think she blamed me for the fact that she wasn’t able to conceive. She didn’t like my work; it kept me away from home too much and there was too much danger, too much violence involved in it. She believed in thou shalt not kill, turn the other cheek, the meek shall inherit. In her mind it would’ve been almost as bad if I’d shot someone in the line of duty as if someone had shot me. Friction there, friction over the inability to conceive, little frictions on other fronts, too. Then she’d gotten pregnant, and she was so happy she glowed. Things really had been good until the sixth month, the sudden pains and bleeding, the miscarriage...
Christ, Novak, I thought, what’s the point of living it all again? Why beat yourself up like this?
I sat in the living room of my nice, comfortable, two-bedroom, rent-free home — one of the perks that had induced me to accept the otherwise low-paying chief’s job seven years ago — and drank my cocoa and stared at the blank TV screen. Mack came in and laid his head on my knee, looked up at me with his dark, liquid eyes. He knew how I was feeling tonight. Dogs are sensitive that way. I patted him, switched on the tube, switched it off again.
Get out of here, go do something, I told myself, before the walls start closing in.
Go get laid. It’s been a while — maybe that’s what you need.
Storm?
No, no way. Over and done with, and except for the sex, not so good while it lasted. Too many frictions there, too; too many angry words. And don’t forget the flap it caused. The chief of police and the once respected, now vilified Mrs. Carey — tongues had really wagged and there’d been no mistaking the serious warning behind Burt Seeley’s private lecture about public image and civic responsibility. Take up with Storm again and I’d be even more strung out, and out of a job to boot. And then what would I do?
God, though, she was amazing in bed. The best ever.
Yeah, well, she’d had plenty of practice, hadn’t she? A hundred, two hundred others before and since. A wonder she hadn’t contracted AIDS or some other sexually transmitted disease — one of the things we’d argued about when she’d admitted to sleeping with others while she was sleeping with me. Hell, for all I knew maybe she did have a disease by now.
Stay away from her. No ifs, ands, or buts.
Out to the kitchen again, Mack padding along behind. I started to make another cup of cocoa, but I didn’t want any more goddamn cocoa. What did I want?
Audrey?
She wanted me; she’d made that plain enough. Smart, attractive, caring, funny, undemanding — everything a man could want in a woman. Casual, our relationship so far; a few dates, a couple of passionate clinches, nothing else, but I could sleep with her if I wanted to. She’d made that plain, too. Only if I did, then it wouldn’t be casual any longer because the one thing she wasn’t was a casual lay. It’d be a commitment, at least on her part, and then if I couldn’t follow through she’d be hurt badly. And I didn’t think I would be able to follow through. And I didn’t want to hurt her.
One strike against us: She was twenty-seven, ten years younger than me. Another: I liked her, more than a little, but I didn’t love her. No feelings of almost desperate yearning, the way it’d been when I first met Eva. No hammering lust, the way it’d been with Storm. Another: Audrey loved kids, wanted children of her own; she was quiet domesticity, traditional family values. I’d had all that, or a taste of it, with Eva, and it hadn’t led to anything but pain; I couldn’t stand to live that kind of life again even if the person and the outcome were different. I was better off unmarried. I functioned better when the only responsibility I had was to myself.
Right. And how about the other two strikes you don’t want to admit to: Audrey’s heritage and your job security. Seeley and the city council and the rest of the town didn’t like you making it with Storm and they wouldn’t like it any better if you took a Native American wife, now would they? Ask Burt Seeley if there was prejudice against Pomos in Pomo and he’d look appalled and vehemently deny it. But it was there, all right, in him and plenty of others, crawling like worms beneath the surface, so goddamn subtle sometimes you could barely see it or smell it for what it was. The Pomos and Lake Miwoks and Lileek Wappos were here a century or more before white settlers, the town and lake and county and a dozen other places and businesses were named for them, but the whites ran things and had ever since they’d shown up. Their word was law, and their laws were meant to protect their own. The natives were tolerated as long as they kept their place, stayed for the most part on their handout reservation lands, and didn’t try to change the status quo. It was all right for an Indian woman to teach at a mainly white high school, as long as it was subjects that didn’t matter too much in their way of thinking, like American history; and it was all right for a white man to date an Indian woman, and lay her if he felt like it, but when it came to taking one for his wife, particularly if he happened to be an appointed member of the white power structure and she happened to be the daughter of an uppity free spirit who’d had the gall to buy a piece of nonreservation land and build a home on it in their midst, well, that just wasn’t acceptable. No sir, not acceptable at all.