Together they walked back to the car. He opened her door and helped her get in. They rode back up the steep and rutted drive without speaking. At the top of the hill, the brown-and-white dog and the shepherd-husky plunged from the woods and ran alongside the car down the dirt road, silent, and then dropped back, and stood in the road with their tongues out, watching them go.
When the car turned onto the blacktop road again the low sun’s light shot through gaps in the trees and hit the windshield straight-on, exploding. The glare was like a blow to her eyes. Her husband held his hand out before him and slowed the car to a crawl. She’d thrown up her own hands instinctively, but now she lowered them and held her eyes open. She saw a hot white hole bum into the air, the world around it black as smoldering paper. She felt the light go into her brain. She felt it move down through her and into her child, like the infusion of knowledge.
A RETREAT
I HAD MY GEAR ALL PACKED WHEN IVAN KNOCKED. A group of us was going down to his family’s farm on the Louisiana line. He came in, wearing his down vest and hunting boots, smoking a Marlboro in the side of his mouth, one eye squinted against the smoke.
“Ready?” he said.
“Yeah. Who’s riding with us?”
“Just you and me, in the pickup.”
I thought maybe the others had already gone on down in Ivan and MaeRose’s Caddy, a 1972 Seville, powder blue. I looked at him and he shrugged.
“What?” I said.
So then he told me, blurting it out in about two sentences, this huge story: He and Eve had been having an affair, she told Dave about it last night, and Dave called up MaeRose and told her.
Jesus Christ.
“It’s been going on awhile, she couldn’t stand it anymore,” Ivan said. He looked at me, then looked away. “Look, I’ll make a confession. We’ve been meeting each other here in your place the last couple of months. I don’t know, maybe longer.”
“Here?” I couldn’t believe it. I’d loaned Ivan a key so he could use my computer while I was at school. Or so he’d said.
“In my bed?” I said.
“In the bed, yeah.” He patted the sofa cushion. “On the couch. On the floor, on that rug there. Out on the screened porch. In the car, one day, down by the bamboo, when you were home.”
I went to the window and looked down there.
“I didn’t see you.”
Ivan stood up and went into the bathroom, dropped his cigarette into the toilet, took a piss, flushed. He came back out and sat down on the sofa. “The fact is, I’m going to need a place to stay for a while. MaeRose asked me not to come back until she leaves. She’s gonna stay with her parents for a while.”
“Will you try to work it out?”
He shook his head, looked at his watch.
“She’s filing for divorce right about now, I imagine.” He lit another cigarette. “You know, she hasn’t been exactly immaculate, herself.”
I didn’t know anything about it. Ivan got up to go into the kitchen. He rummaged in the cabinet for the bourbon, found my bottle of Ezra, pulled the cork and took a swig, corked it, and put it back into the cabinet. He came back into the living room. He was looking around at the walls, as if there was something missing, a painting or a window or something.
“So, you still want to go?” he said. “I’m going. I got to get away until this all calms down a little bit.”
I stood in the living room trying to comprehend it all. You think you know what’s going on around you, what your friends are up to, and then they turn out to have these secret lives. I couldn’t believe he and Eve had been fucking in my bed. When was the last time I’d gotten laid in that bed? As a matter of fact, I myself had fantasized about Eve in that bed, because she’d flirted with me at a party. In fact, she’d flirted with me in front of Dave, and I’d wondered what the hell she was up to. Another time, during a party at their house, Eve and I had been in her study, talking. Dave opened the side door, from the bathroom, stuck his head in, glared at us, then pulled his head out and slammed the door. So, yeah, I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know what. I wondered what the hell she was up to.
Fucking Ivan the whole time. I was a little depressed by the news. I’d been depressed in general for something like five or six years. This little setback, of course, was different. Nothing like the real thing. But it all adds up. I’d gone back to school, and I was hanging in there but not too well. I hadn’t gone in with a plan. I’d tried moving in with a buddy of mine and that didn’t work, I couldn’t suppress my desire to hole up, hide. I’d moved into this apartment when the old fellow living here died, he’d been holed up chainsmoking in it for twenty years. He was a retired professor of mathematics, a recluse who’d scrawled his last message on a scrap of notebook paper in shaky penciclass="underline" “Gone out — be back in a few minutes.” And then he didn’t go out, he took an overdose of pills and went to bed and died. A friend of mine who lived across the hall from him, in the habit of checking on him, found his body and called the police. She was shaken as she showed me around the next day. We found his note and a large half-empty bottle of phenobarbital. One thin dark suit clung to a closet hanger as if to a frame of old bones. Nothing at all in the chest of drawers. Not a morsel of food in the apartment. No roaches. No reason for them to hang around. He lived off cigarettes and coffee and barbiturates.
I moved in and scrubbed streaks of tobacco smoke residue off all the woodwork with Formula 409. The stove was dusty but otherwise clean. The refrigerator was empty except for a two-month-old carton of half-and-half stuck to the shelf. I stripped up the old stained indoor-outdoor carpet from the floors and sanded the wood down to reveal a beautiful blond oak. I rubbed in Johnson’s Wax with my hands, buffed it with a rented machine, and then I lay out in the middle of the empty, polished expanse of narrow oak boards, my eye to the floor, each board like a golden lane leaping up and away down a gleaming runway. I marveled at the almost tactile sense of starting over, the clarity of vision, the simplicity and beauty of the big open room. From where I lay, the windows looked out upon open sky, a great big protective bubble of opportunity. I’d gone back to school to make something of my life, I could do anything in the world. I’d concentrate and get it done. But within two weeks all the bad stuff had seeped back in. The staying home and skipping classes, the looking out windows at people in cars at the stoplight, at people walking by on the sidewalk, at people on the sidewalk stopped to talk, at people who glanced up and saw me watching them, spoke to one another, and then looked up as I stood there looking back. Strangers.
I figured the old professor probably had a pretty good life when he was about my age, and this unnerved me. I wished I’d kept his phenobarbital, just to keep myself calm. I’ve never had the slightest leaning toward suicide. I always think if I can wait it out, things will change. I wondered how long the old professor had felt that way.
“What about it, Jack?” Ivan said. “We going?”
I thought about it, and said, “Sure.”
“Don’t get so excited,” he said.
“I was just thinking about things.”
“You’re in no shape to do that,” he said. I had to laugh, a little anyway. I picked up my bags and we went downstairs. It was one of those cold and windy, drizzly days and we hurried across the yard. Ivan’s truck had a camper shell over the bed, and I tossed my stuff in there next to his young retriever, Mary, who stood there with her head ducked, wagging her tail. There were sliding windows from there to the cab, and Mary stuck her head through and let her tongue drip onto the seat between us as we got settled and strapped on the seat belts.