Her voice purred in his ear. “Spending all my time here; I mean, half my clothes here and half at my place. It’s crazy.”
He said nothing, but his eyes were open.
She was silent too. A log shifted in the fireplace. “It’s just such a waste, is all,” she said finally. “The rent alone, not to mention gas and wear and tear on my car…”
He got up to poke the fire, his back to her. “Terry’s going back to the West Coast this summer. He wants me to go along. For a vacation. I mean, I’ve never seen it.”
“So what does that mean?” she said.
He poked the fire.
“You know I can’t go,” she said after a moment. “I’ve got courses to take at New Paltz. You know that, right?”
He felt guilty. He looked guilty. He shrugged.
Later, he made Irish coffee, heavy on sugar, cream, and whiskey. She was curled up in the corner of the sofa, her legs bare, feet tucked under her. She was spending the night.
The wind had come up and sleet began to rattle the windows. He brought the coffee to her, sat beside her and took her hand. It was then that the picture of her perched at the edge of the snowy dock came back to him. “Tell me again,” he said, “about the water, how it felt.”
“Hm?”
“You know, with the Polar Bear Club?”
He watched her slow smile, watched the snowy afternoon seep back into her eyes. “Oh, that — I’ve been doing it since I was three. It’s nothing. I don’t even think about it.” She looked past him, staring into the flames. “You won’t believe this, but it’s not that cold — almost the opposite.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I won’t.”
“No, really,” she insisted, looking him full in the face now. She paused, shrugged, took a sip of her coffee. “It depends on your frame of mind, I guess.”
At the end of June, just before he left for San Francisco, they took a trip together. He’d heard about a fishing camp in northern Quebec, a place called Chibougamau, where pike and walleye attacked you in the boat. There were Eskimos there, or near there, anyway. And the last four hours of driving was on dirt roads.
She had no affection for pike or walleye either, but this was their vacation, their last chance to be together for a while. She smiled her quiet smile and packed her bag. They spent one night in Montreal and then drove the rest of the way the following day. When they got there — low hills, a scattering of crude cabins, and a river as raw and hard as metal — Marty was so excited his hands trembled on the wheel. “I want to fish,” he said to the guide who greeted them.
The guide was in his forties, hard-looking, with a scar that ran in a white ridge from his ear to his Adam’s apple. He was dressed in rubber knee boots, jeans, and a lumberjack shirt. “Hi” and “thank you” was about all the English he could manage. He gestured toward the near cabin.
“Ours?” Marty said, pointing first to Naina and then himself.
The guide nodded.
Marty looked up at the sun; it squatted on the horizon, bloated and misshapen.
“Listen, Naina,” he said, “honey, would you mind if…I mean, I’m dying to wet my line and since we’re paying for today and all—”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll unpack. Have fun.” She grinned at the guide. The guide grinned back.
A moment later, Marty was out on the river, experimentally manning the oars while the guide stood in the bow, discoursing on technique. Marty tried to listen, but French had never been his strong suit; in the next instant the guide cast a lure ahead of them and immediately connected with a fish that bent the rod double. Marty pulled at the oars, and the guide, fighting his fish, said something over his shoulder. This time, though, the guide’s face was alive with urgency and the something came in an angry rush, as if he were cursing. Pull harder? Marty thought. Is that what he wants?
He dug in a bit harder, his eyes on the line and the distant explosion where the fish — it was a walleye — cut the surface. But now the guide was raving at him, nonstop, harsh and guttural, and all the while looking desperately from Marty to the bent rod and back again. Marty looked round him. The river was loud as a freight train. “What?” he shouted. “What’s the matter?” And then all at once, his eyes wild, the guide heaved the pole into the water, knocked Marty aside, and took up the oars in a frenzy. Then Marty saw it, the precipice yawning before them, the crash and flow of the water, spray in his face, the shore looming up, and the guide snatching frantically at the brush shooting past them. With ten feet to spare, the guide caught a low-hanging branch, the boat jerked back, and all of a sudden Marty was in the water.
But what water! The shock of it beat the breath from him and he went under. He grasped at the air and then he was swept over the falls like a bit of fluff, pounded on the rocks, and flung ashore with the flotsam below. He was lucky. Nothing broken. The guide, muttering under his breath and shooting him murderous looks, sewed up the gash in his thumb with fishing line while Marty gritted his teeth and drank off a glass of whiskey like the wounded sheriff in an old western. It took him two hours to stop shivering.
In bed that night they heard the howling of wolves, a sound that opened up the darkness like a surgeon’s blade. “It was a communication problem,” Marty insisted, “that’s all.” Naina pressed her lips to his bruises, kneaded his back, nursed him with a sad, tender, tireless grace.
He woke at dawn, aching. She lay stiff beside him, her eyes open wide. “Will you miss me?” she said.
At first, he’d written her every day — postcards, mainly — from Des Moines, Albuquerque, the Grand Canyon. But then he got to San Francisco, found a job bartending, and drifted into another life. For a while he and Terry stayed with a girl Terry knew from his last trip, then they found a room for sixty dollars a week in a tenement off Geary, but Terry got mugged one night and the two of them moved in with a cocktail waitress Marty knew from work. Things were loose. He stopped writing. And when September came around, he didn’t write to the principal at school either.
December was half gone by the time he got back.
The Camaro had broken down on him just outside Chicago — a burnt valve — and the repairs ate up everything he had. He slept in the bus station for three nights while a Pakistani with mad black eyes worked over his car, and if it wasn’t for the hitchhiker who split the cost of gas with him, he’d still be there. When he finally coasted into Yorktown and pulled up at the curb outside Naina’s apartment, he was running on empty. For a long while, he stood there in the street looking up at her window. It had been a joyless trip back and he’d thought of her the whole way — her mouth, her eyes, the long tapering miracle of her body, especially her body — and twice he’d stopped to send her a card. Both times he changed his mind. Better to see her, try to explain himself. But now that he was here, outside her apartment, his courage failed him.
He stood there in the cold for fifteen minutes, then started up the driveway. There was ice on the steps and he lost his footing and fell against the door with a thump that shook the frame. Then he rang the bell and listened to the crashing in his chest. A stranger came to the door, a big fat-faced woman of thirty with a baby in her arms. No, Naina didn’t live there anymore. She’d left in September. No, she didn’t know where she was.
He sat in the car and tried to collect himself. Her mother’s, he thought, she’s probably at her mother’s. He patted down his pockets and counted the money. Two dollars and sixty-seven cents. A dollar for gas, a pack of cigarettes, and two phone calls.
He called his landlord first. Mr. Weiner answered the phone himself, his breathing ravaged with emphysema. He was sorry, Mr. Weiner was, but when he hadn’t heard from him he’d gone ahead and rented the place to someone else. His things were in the basement — and if he didn’t pick them up within the week he’d have to put them out for the trash, was that understood?