"It's a nice town for kids."
She shook her head. "No kids." Then she said, "You'll want to be going. Your dinner will be waiting."
"Norman Rockwell," he said, "is stopping by tonight to sketch us."
A little flaring of the fine nostrils. "An artist, isn't he? A sentimental artist? So you think I picture your home life as a sentimental ideal?"
"Happy families are all alike," Michael said.
"What will you have for dinner?"
"We call it supper," Michael said. "We'll have pot roast."
"I mustn't keep you from it," Lara said. "You can tell your protégée Phyllis I'll serve on her committee. I hope she won't regret it."
"I'm confident she won't."
She offered him her hand. "And," she said, "we can get to know one another."
"Yes. Yes, I hope so."
Just before he turned away, she cocked her head and raised an eyebrow. As if to say it was fated. As if to say, inevitable now. When he hit the cold street, his heart soared.
It was a three-quarter-mile walk from the coffee shop to his house. The cold, the walk and the scintillations of his encounter with Marie-Claire Purcell had sharpened his desire for a drink. Kristin, in gym clothes, was in the kitchen preparing one of her quickie Viking specials, warm smoked salmon with dill and mustard sauce. She had taught two classes and spent the rest of the day at the pool. He went by her and took the Scotch bottle out of a cupboard.
"You're late," she said.
"I was detained."
"Really?"
He poured out half a water glass of whiskey and added water from the tap.
"By Phyllis?" Kristin asked.
"Sort of. You want a beer out of the fridge?"
"Sure," she said. "What did little Phyllis want?"
Michael got his wife the beer.
"Just wanted me to line up her thesis committee. So I did."
"Sometimes I wonder who's assisting who."
"Assisting whom."
She turned to him, put her beer down beside the smoked salmon and gave him the finger. Then she walked out of the room.
Michael quietly addressed the silence she had left behind her.
"Is there some rule," he asked, "by which every time I feel halfway human you get to throw a shit fit?"
He could feel himself coming down hard. It was downright physiological, he thought, the collapse of elan, the sensation of your chin hitting the floor. He kept the image of her retreating figure in his mind's eye, her upright posture, her waggling braid, her small perfect ass in the light gray flannel tights. Though he dreaded it, something about her anger aroused him.
He swallowed his drink. He was bored with pondering the etiology of his own hard-ons, his own insights, literary and otherwise. Bored with introspection. A man without a meaning was a paltry thing, and increasingly, since the day of the deer hunt, he had seen himself revealed as one.
Perhaps, he thought, it was not boredom but fear. They were closely related. Behind the bland irritation, the true horrors. His son came in, pulling off a hockey shirt and tossing it in the laundry pile.
"Mom's in a snit," the boy said.
"Have some respect," Michael said, pouring another drink, "for your mother's feelings."
"Huh?"
"How can we call the rage of Iphigenia a snit?" he asked. And while the poor kid was dutifully trying to remember who Iphigenia was, Michael commanded him to do the laundry. "Don't just toss that dirty shirt in there. Stick it all in the machine. I'll get dinner."
While Paul hauled the basket into the laundry room, Michael took his drink up to the master bedroom. His wife was not to be found.
"Kris?"
The door to the attic was slightly ajar but there was no light on in the stair that led up to it. He opened the door a little more, on darkness.
"Kris?" he called up.
"It's all right," she said. "I'm sorry."
He found the light switch and snapped it but the bulb must have been broken; the stairway and the attic stayed dark. He climbed the first two steps.
"You know," he said, "you must know there's nothing between me and Phyllis. I mean nothing."
"I believe you," she said. "I'll come down. I'll come down in a minute."
"I'm going to put your lovely salmon out."
"Yes," she said. "Yes, go ahead."
He stood in her darkness, wondering whether to put another foot on a higher stair.
"Go ahead," she said. "I'll be down."
Paul put the laundry through its wash cycles and Michael warmed the fish and finished making the tart sauce but there was no sign of Kristin. He put two plates on the kitchen table. By then he was well down the bottle of Scotch.
Paul, hungry from hockey practice, finished his first serving quickly and helped himself to another from the stove.
"Leave some for your mother."
"Of course, Dad."
Michael opened a beer to have with the smoked salmon. "You know what I think," he said to his son. "I think there's a vestigial reason why we like this kind of tart, rich stuff. Savory stuff."
"Like a prehistoric impulse or something?"
"That's right." He looked at the salmon in its yellow mustard sauce. "I think we used to like rotten meat. We must have cached it like bears. We're trying to get the taste back."
Michael paused and put his fork down.
"That's like so disgusting. Yarg. Cripes."
"You dismiss my thesis?"
Paul, who had enjoyed their banter since learning to talk, was discovering the difference between his father sober and his father drunk. He did not much care for the drunk game. He quietly cleared his place at table, emptied the rest of his second helping in the sink and prepared to do the dishes.
Michael spent another hour at the table, tapering off the drink, brooding haphazardly, recalling his meeting with Lara. Then he remembered Kristin in the darkness upstairs. When he went up, Paul was at his computer. The door to the attic was firmly closed. Then he saw that Kristin had gone to bed. Her braid undone, she lay facing the wall. He went in and lay down beside her.
"I swear this to you," he said. "I swear it. There is no woman in my life but you. No one. And if that is the trouble between us… then there is none."
She turned over to face him. "You wouldn't lie to me, Michael?"
He put an arm around her.
"How can you think I would risk what we have for a little kid like Phyllis? She's a baby. I mean really, Kris."
Touching her cheek, he saw some question in the look she fixed on him. It made him understand what it suddenly seemed should have been obvious, that perhaps the trouble was not pretty Phyllis but something else, something Kristin herself might not understand. The thought frightened him.
He got up and went to check on Paul, who had shut his computer off and propped his Tolkien by the table lamp and was saying his prayers. He quietly told the boy good night.
"Night, Dad."
Careful of her wounded leg, he and Kristin gently made love. It was great pleasure to have her long-boned, long-legged body under his hands. A strong body, possessed of surprising softnesses. She could be most avid, with a style of alternate yielding and resistance. There was a kind of physical pride to her; it was necessary to win her each time, convince her. Sometimes it made him think of logic, little syllogisms, discoveries, recognitions. But that night things did not go very well. He kept imagining Lara; Kristin held back as though she knew his mind.
A few days later he had lunch at a burger joint in town with Norman Cevic.
"Miz Purcell," said Norman, "oh my!"
"So what's her story?"
"She had a husband originally. They were hired together. They'd been living in France. Teaching there."
"Her husband was French?"
"Her old man was French and he was considered quite a catch for the poly sci department. He was Ridenhour's kind of guy. But somehow she lost him along the way."