In the morning she got up early and went to the closest thing there was to a deli and returned triumphantly with bagels and lox. Outside, the town had been museum dead, but the sky was lemony with sun, and elongations of light, ovals of brightened blue, now dappled Pinky’s covers. She laid the breakfast out in them, and he rolled over and kissed her, his face waxy with sleep. He pointed at the lox. “You like that sort of stuff?”
“Yup.” Her mouth was already full with it, the cool, slimy pink. “Eat it all the time.”
He sighed and sank back into his pillow. “After breakfast I’ll teach you some Yiddish words.”
“I already know some Yiddish words. I’m from New York. Here, eat some of this.”
“I’ll teach you tush and shmuck.” Pinky yawned, then grinned. “And shiksa.”
“All the things a nice Jewish boy practices on before he marries a nice Jewish girl. I know those.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
She refused to look at him. “I don’t know.”
“I know,” said Pinky, and he stood up on the bed, like a child about to bounce, toweringly naked, priapic. She could barely look. Oh, for a beaded bulrush. A train disappearing into a tunnel. “You’re falling in love with me!” he exclaimed, gazing merrily down. She still had her coat on, and had stopped chewing. She stared, disbelievingly, up at him. Sometimes she thought she was just trying to have fun in life, and other times she realized she must be terribly confused. She narrowed her eyes. Then she opened her mouth wide so that he could see the train wreck of chewed-up bagel and lox.
“I like that,” said Pinky. “You’re onto something there.”
HER POEMS, as she stated in letters to friends in New York, were not going well; she had put them on the back burner, and they had fallen behind the stove. She had met this guy. Something had happened to the two of them in a cave, she wasn’t sure what. She had to get out of here. She was giving her final reading to the library patrons and matrons in less than three weeks, and that would pretty much be it. I hope you are not wearing those new, puffy evening dresses I see in magazines. They make everyone look like sticky buns. It is cold. Love, Odette.
LAIRD WAS CURIOUS. He kept turning his head sideways during the sit-ups. “So you and Pinky hitting it off?”
“Who knows?” said Odette.
“Well, I mean, everyone’s had their difficulties in life; his I’m only a little aware of. I thought you’d find him interesting.”
“Sure, anthropologically.”
“You think he’s a dork.”
“Laird, we’re in our forties here. You can’t use words like dork anymore.” The sit-ups were getting harder. “He’s not a dork. He’s a doofus. Maybe. Maybe a doink.”
“You’re a hard woman,” said Laird.
“Oh, I’m not,” pleaded Odette, collapsing on the rubber mat. “Really I’m not.”
AT NIGHT he began to hold her in a way that stirred her deeply. He slept with one hand against the small of her back, the other capped against her head, as if to protect her from bad thoughts. Or, perhaps, thoughts at all. How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks. She would open her mouth before the library fellowship people, and out would come: There once was a woman from … Someone would rush to a phone booth and call the police.
But perhaps you could live only from the neck down. Perhaps you could live with the clothes you were taking off all piled on top of your head, in front of your face, not just a sweater with a too-small neck but everything caught there — pants, shoes, and socks — a crazed tangle on your shoulders, in lieu of a head, while your body, stark naked, prepared to live the rest of its life in the sticks, the boonies, the fly-over, the rain. Perhaps you could. For when she slept against him like that, all the rest of the world collapsed into a suitcase under the bed. It was the end of desire, this having. Oh, here oh here she was. He would wrap himself around her, take her head like an infant’s into his hand and breathe things to her, her throat her chest, in his beginning to sleep. Go to sleep, go to sleep with me.
IN THE MORNING she warmed her arms over the blue zinnias of the gas jets and heated water for coffee and eggs. Over the newspaper, she pretended she and Pinky were Beatrice and Benedick, or Nick and Nora Charles, which is what she always pretended in a love affair, at least for a few days, until the evidence overwhelmed her.
“Why are you always talking with your hands?” asked Pinky. “You think you’re Jewish?”
She glared at him. “You know, that’s what I hate about this part of the country,” she replied. “Everyone’s so repressed. If you use your body in the least way while you’re talking, people think you’re trying out for a Broadway show.”
“Kiss me,” he said, and he closed his eyes.
On a weekday Pinky would be off to his office, to work on another farm bankruptcy or a case of animal abuse. “My clients,” he said wearily. “You would never want to go out to eat with them. They come into my office reeking of cowshit, they lean back in the chair, set their belly out like that, then tell you about how some Humane Society bastard gave them a summons because their goat had worms.” Across his face there breathed a sigh of tragedy. “It’s a sad thing not to have clients you can go out to eat with.” He shook his head. “It’s a sad thing, a goat with worms.”
There was something nice about Pinky, but that something was not Nick Charles. Pinky was more like a grave and serious brother of Nick’s, named Chuck. Chuck Charles. When you had parents who would give you a name like that, there was nothing funny anymore.
“What do you write poems about?” he asked her once in the middle of the night.
“Whores,” she said.
“Whores,” he repeated, nodding in the dark.
She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W’s. When she’d ask him how he liked them, he would say, “Fine. I’m on page …” and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he’d accomplished that day. “The Wadsworth is a little too literaturey for me.”
“Wordsworth,” she corrected. They were in his kitchen, drinking juice.
“Wordsworth. Isn’t there a poet named Wadsworth?”
“No. You’re probably thinking of Longfellow. That was his middle name.”
“Longfellow. Now who’s he again?”
“How about Leaves of Grass? What did you think of the poems in there?”
“OK. I’m on page fifty,” he said. Then he showed her his gun, which he kept in his kitchen in a leather case, like a trombone. He kept a rifle, he said, in the basement.
Odette frowned. “You hunt?”
“Sure. Jews aren’t supposed to hunt, I know. But in this part of the country it’s best to have a gun.” He smiled. “Bavarians, you know. Here, try it out. Let me see how you look with a gun.”
“I’m afraid of guns.”
“Nothing to be afraid of. Just heft it and look down the top of the barrel and line up the sights.”
She sighed, lifted the gun, pressed the butt hard against her right shoulder, and aimed it at the kitchen counter. “Now, see the notch in the metal sticking up in the middle of your barrel?” Pinky was saying. “You have to get the bead in the middle of the notch.”
She closed her left eye. “I can feel the urge coming on to blow away that cutting board,” she said.