“Driving.”
“Driving, yes. I see that.” She looked out the window on high desert scrub, the world bleached of color, the sun as persistent as a nightmare. “But this is not Tahoe.”
“No,” he said, “no, it's not. Change of plan.”
“This is not Vegas.” He stole a glance at her and her face was set, angry, all the soft opalescent beauty drained out of it. “What is this? This is nothing.”
An exit blew by, trucks drawn up in a steel ridge, a hundred cars and milling stupid people like stick figures in an artist's rendering of the ultimate truck stop, gas, food, lodging, condoms, pigs in a blanket, tequila. A sign for Indian jewelry, ONLY 20 MILES. And then scrub, more scrub, and the long dwindling slash of the road.
“You stop,” she said, and she turned her wrathful face to him. “At the next place you stop and I don't care what it is, you stop.”
“A pool,” Madison chimed in. “I want a place with a pool. Can I go swimming, Mommy, can I?”
He heard himself say, “Sure, no problem. Next place. Next place with a pool.”
For a moment, all three of them fixed their gaze on the road ahead, the gleaming chain-link of cars and trucks vanishing into the horizon, cartoon characters whinnying and chortling in the background, the tires faintly humming. “Something is wrong,” Natalia said then.
“Nothing's wrong.”
“Then why not Tahoe. You promised Tahoe.”
“I told you, I changed my mind.”
“Those people-”
“Fuck those people.”
She drilled him with her eyes. She didn't want him cursing around Madison, and he knew that-that was one of the rules. No cursing around Madison. “Those people-” she repeated.
“Fuck those people.”
And so it went, ad nauseam, for two weeks and one day.
Their first night in the house, after four in the local motel and five full days of shopping, hassling with the utilities, arranging furniture and unpacking the big cardboard boxes sent on ahead from California, he decided to inaugurate the kitchen. A little Thai/Chinese fusion was what he was thinking: three-flavor stir-fry (scallops, monkfish, tiger shrimp), pork spring rolls to start and a nice medium-spicy squid salad that would have enough push to it to satisfy Natalia and yet not overwhelm Madison's tender young palate. Though Madison was learning-he had to give her credit for that. Ever since her mother had moved in with him he'd been weaning her off the bland stuff, slipping her a slice of daikon or Vidalia onion when he was cooking, an extra portion of wasabi and pickled ginger with her sashimi-and then a bowl of green-tea ice cream to cool and compare. Or having her do the taste test with a tiny sliver of the tan chipotle mecos he liked to use in his chicken enchiladas or the dark red coil of a smoked serrano, and always an ice afterward. She was getting to be a little champ, actually, insisting on a dollop of jalapeño jelly instead of cinnamon on her butter-drenched toast in the morning.
The supermarket wasn't what it was in California, of course, but he'd found an Asian market in Fishkill (a little bit of a haul from Garrison, but he tried to restrict his shopping to the north so as to stay away from Peterskill, for obvious reasons) and got pretty much everything he needed, from the cellophane noodles to the sweet chili sauce, spring roll wrappers, fresh cilantro and gingerroot. It had rained earlier, the clouds gathering atop Storm King and fanning out to sink low over West Point, and that was something he'd missed, the suddenness and violence of the thunderstorms; now, standing at the kitchen counter, he caught the indefinable scent of his boyhood drifting across the lawn and through the screens, the smell of the woods, sumac, mold, rot, the superabundant water sitting in its pools in the hidden places, everything in ferment. He was happy suddenly, feeling as if a load had been lifted from him, a load that had worn him down this past month and more, happy to be cleaning squid with one of his sharp new J. A. Henckels ice-hardened knives and having a glass of Champagne at the window, the sky close and gray and the grass spread out beneath him such a dense green it was almost black. Happy about the Champagne too, the price on the Perrier-Jouët so good he'd gone ahead and bought a case, the French wines cheaper here by far than on the west coast, thinking he'd be drinking a lot more French from now on, not to mention Italian and even Spanish. He was feeling all this, alternately plying the knife and setting it down to lift the Champagne flute to his lips, when Natalia slipped up noiselessly behind him and wrapped her arms round his waist.
“Hey,” she murmured. “How is it going? Looks good. Squid, yes?” There was a saucepan on the stove, the heat up high-he was making a fish stock from the scraps of the monkfish, a little white wine, butter, garlic and green onions to flavor the squid-and his hands were full. Normally, he didn't like to be bothered when he was cooking-cooking required your full concentration or things were apt to go wrong-but he was feeling so good he just leaned back into her to enjoy the feel of her long-fingered hands on his abdomen, up under his rib cage and where he was especially sensitive, on his chest and nipples. “Feels nice,” he said, turning his head for a kiss. “You want a glass of Champagne?”
“Fine,” she said, moving away from him now, “yes, I would like that, but I am looking for the hammer I have just bought-have you seen this hammer?”
She'd found a set of musty-looking turn-of-the-century prints in one of the local antique shops, featuring two children, a boy and a girl, in various poses-swallowed up in a maelstrom of brooding vegetation, strolling hand in hand like lost waifs, kicking their bare feet in a snarling stream, gazing up into the heavens as if for guidance-and she'd spent the last hour trying to decide where to hang them. “No,” he said, “I haven't seen it, but would you mind-the Champagne's in the ice bucket there and my hands…” He held up both palms, wet and slimed with the exudate of the squid, in evidence. “And that saucepan on the stove there-would you turn the heat down? To low. All the way to low.”
She was wearing a pair of capris to show off the perfect swell of her calves and her beautiful ankles and feet, open-toed sandals and a white blouse hiked up and knotted under her breasts-and she'd put her hair up too, no nonsense here, a whole house to whip into order. He cross-hatched the flattened slabs of squid to tenderize them and watched her glide across the floor to the stove and then pour herself a glass of the wine. And what was he feeling-love? Lust? The quiet seep of fulfillment and domestic bliss?
“Toast?” he proposed, putting down the knife to wipe his hands on a towel and then taking up his own glass.
The sun had fingered its way through the clouds, suddenly illuminating a patch of woods beyond the window-up came the light as if wired to a rheostat-and then just as quickly it faded. A snapshot. With a very long exposure. She was watching him intently. Poised on one foot, the glass at her lips. “Toast to what?” she asked, her face changing. “To, to”-and here it came, the flush along the cheekbones, the sheets of moisture to armor her eyes-“to a man who will not even make the introduction to his mother? In his own hometown? Of his fiancée? Is that the toast you want? Is that it?”
He said her name, softly, in melioration.
“Because I cannot stand this shit, and that is what it is, “shit.” You hear me?”
“Please,” he said, “not now.”
“Yes, now,” she said, spreading her legs for balance and then throwing back her head to drain the flute in a single gulp as if she were back in Jaroslavl with a glass of no-name vodka. “I don't believe you. I don't believe anything you say. This money. Where do you get this money? Is it drugs, is that it?”
He just stared. He didn't want to get into this.
“Will I-am I to go to prison, then? Like Sandman? And you-you have been in prison too, I know it.”