Then it was back out into the main room and the real kicker, the deal-sealer, the sine qua non — a regulation-size slate-topped pool table. A pool table! All this — leather armchairs, Persian carpets, gleaming linoleum, heat, twin beds, the lake, the rowboat, swans — and a pool table too? It was too much. Whatever the old man was asking for rent, because this wasn’t strictly housesitting and we were willing to make a token monthly payment, I was ready to double. Triple. Anything he wanted. I squeezed Nora’s hand. She beamed up at me as the old couple looked on, smiling, moved now by the sight of us there in the depths of that house that had no doubt harbored children at one time, grandchildren even.
I felt a vast calm settle over me. “We’ll take it,” I said.
—
At the end of the first week, after checking on us six or seven times a day (or spying on us, as Nora insisted, Mrs. Kuenzli fretting over how we were getting along—Fine, thanks—and even one night creaking down the stairs with a pot of homemade chicken-spaetzle soup), the old couple climbed into a limousine and went off to the airport, leaving us in possession. The main house was sealed off, of course, but I didn’t care about that. What I cared about was getting out of the shack. What I cared about was Nora. Making her happy. Making myself happy — and everybody else too. Within days of the Kuenzlis’ departure, my friends began showing up unannounced for the purpose of shooting 8-ball and cranking up the volume on the Bang & Olufsen sound system the Kuenzlis had at some point so fortuitously installed, then maybe getting wrecked and taking the rowboat out on the glittering surface of the lake while the trees flamed and the swans bobbed in our wake. Even the weather cooperated. If September had been a loss, one of the coldest and rainiest on record, October tiptoed in on a streak of pure sunshine and temperatures that climbed into the seventies.
I was shooting pool one Saturday afternoon with Artie and another friend, Richard, all three of us wired on Black Beauties and chain-drinking cheap beer, when Nora came in the door looking flushed. She had news. While we’d been frittering our time away — that was how she put it, “frittering,” but she was smiling now, hardly able to contain herself — she’d gone out on her own to interview for a job.
I loved her in that moment, loved the way the color came into her face because she was addressing all three of us now, not just me, and that made her self-conscious no matter the news, which was good, very good, I could see that in an instant. “Well,” I said, “you get it?”
The smile stalled, came back again. She nodded. “It’s not much,” she said, already retreating. She looked from me to Artie and Richard. “Minimum wage — but it’s six nights a week.”
I’d set down my pool cue and was coming across the room to her, that big room with its buffed floors and the carpets thick enough for anything, when I noticed she was all dressed up, and not in business clothes but in the fringed boots and gauzy top she wore when we were going bar-hopping. “What is it,” I said, “that hostessing thing?”
She nodded.
“At Brennan’s?”
Her smile was gone now. Her eyes — she was wearing her false lashes and pale blue eyeshadow — sank into mine. I was the one who’d told her about the job, which Richard had heard about from the bartender there. All you have to do is smile, I’d told her. All you have to do is say ‘Party of four?’ and let them follow you to the table. You can do that, can’t you? I hadn’t meant to be demeaning. Or maybe I had. She was strong-willed but I wanted to break her down, make her dependent, make her mine, but at the same time I wanted her to hold up her end, because we were a couple and that was what couples did. They worked. Both of them.
I took her by the hand, tried to peck a kiss to her cheek, but she pulled away.
“It means I’ll be gone nights.”
I shrugged. I could feel Artie and Richard watching me. There was a record on the stereo — I remember this clearly — something drum-based, with a churning polyrhythmic beat that seemed to fester under my words. “At least it’s something,” I said.
Artie lined up a shot. The balls clacked. Nothing dropped. “Hey, it’s great news,” he said, straightening up. “Congrats.”
Nora gave him a look. “It’s only temporary,” she said.
—
We settled into a routine. The phone rang in the dark and I got up, answered it and found out what school I was going to because somebody who just couldn’t stand another day of it had called in sick — either that or hung himself — and I was back home by three-thirty or four, at which point she’d be drinking coffee and making herself scrambled eggs and toast. Then I’d drive her to work and either sit there at the bar for a couple (depending on how I was feeling about our financial situation), or go back home and shoot pool by myself, pitting Player A against Player B and trying not to play favorites, until she got off at ten and I went to pick her up. Sometimes we’d linger at the bar, but most nights — weeknights anyway — we’d go back home because I needed the sleep. We climbed into our separate beds, snug enough, warm and dry and feeling pampered — or if not pampered, at least secure — and when I switched off my reading lamp and turned to the wall the last image fading in my brain was of the steady bright nimbus of Nora’s light and her face shining there above her book.
The weather held all that month, even as the leaves persisted and the lake rippled under the color of them. Whenever we could, we went out in the rowboat, and though we never acknowledged it I suppose we were both thinking the same thing — that we’d better take advantage of it while we could because each day of sun might be the last. I’d row and Nora would lie back against the seat in the stern, her eyes closed and her bare legs stretched out before her. What did I feel? Relaxed. As relaxed as I’ve ever felt in my life, before or since. There was something more to it too. I felt powerful, in command, the muscles of my arms flexing and releasing while Nora dozed at my feet and the rest of the world went still as held breath.
It was a feeling that couldn’t last. And it didn’t. Less than a week into November there was frost on the windshield when I got up for school and the sun seemed to have vanished, replaced by a low cloud cover and winds out of the north. Finally, reluctantly, I pulled the rowboat ashore and turned it over for the winter. Two days later there was a rim of ice around the lake and the temperature went down into the teens overnight. But, as I say, the house was warm and well-insulated, with a furnace that could have heated six houses, and when we went to bed at night we couldn’t resist joking about the shack, what we’d be suffering if we were still there. “My feet,” Nora would say, “they’d freeze to the floor like when you touch the tip of your tongue to the ice-cube tray.” “Yeah,” I’d say, “yeah, but you wouldn’t even notice because by then we’d be dried up and frozen like those mummies they found in the Andes.” And she’d laugh, we’d both laugh, and listen to the whisper of the furnace as it clicked on and drove the warm air through the bedroom and into the big room beyond where the pool table stood draped in darkness.
And then came the night when I dropped her off at Brennan’s and had my first drink and then another and didn’t feel like going home. It was as if some gauge inside me had been turned up high, all the way, top of the dial. I felt like that a lot back then, and maybe it was just an overload of testosterone, maybe that was all it was, but on this night I sat at the bar and kept on drinking. I knew the regulars, an older crowd that came in for dinner and gradually gave way to people like Nora and me, the music shifting from a soft whisper of jazz to the rock and roll we wanted to hear as the late diners gathered up their coats and gloves and doggie bags and headed out into the night. I’d been talking a lot of nothing to a guy in a sport coat who must have been in his thirties, a martini drinker, and when he got up and left a guy my own age slid onto the stool beside me. He asked me what was happening at the same time I asked him, then he ordered a drink — tequila and tonic, very West Coast, or hip, that is — and we started talking. His name was Steve, he had rust-red hair kinked out to his shoulders and he wore a thin headband of braided leather.