They had moved into a tacit arrangement of living together, here, most of the time. But she had kept her house in Burlingame, south of San Francisco, and although Monks wasn't keeping count, he knew that he was alone more now. He stayed with her there sometimes, but he was rooted here, in his place, and he got restless when he was away for long. He loved solitude. The advantages of suburbia – shopping, movies, people – did not interest him. For her, the isolation of the country wore just as thin.
There were other practicalities that came into play. She was an internist and had spent several years as the in-house physician for that same computer corporation. She had come out of last year's emotional wrenching not ready to get back into the mainstream of medicine. But inactivity was wearing thin, too.
He heard the door open, felt her come to stand beside him.
'This isn't fair," she said. "You're making me the bad guy. Kicking you when you're down." He noted that she had refilled her own glass, with a fine Carmenet sauvignon blanc, and she seemed a little unsteady.
'That's not what I'm doing," he said. "And it's not what you're doing. What's happening at the hospital and what's happening here, they're two different things."
"But that's why you're doing it. Isn't it."
The term that came into Monks's mind was one that Emil Zukich used – the legendary mechanic who lived up the road, and who had built and rebuilt the Bronco. Metal on metaclass="underline" the point where bushings and bearings and all the other buffers had ground down to dust, and the machine crashed along tearing up its own bones. It was true that external circumstances might precipitate such a thing.
But between Martine and him, it had built on its own, unseen and unnoticed except in tiny increments – the unhappy expression in a passing glance, the slight reluctance to touch. The sense that there was something going on in the background that was never brought forth.
"You're changing the subject," he said.
"I don't want to be away from you, Carroll. I just don't think I can keep on making it here."
"I understand that, Martine. I really do."
But he knew in his guts, even if she did not, that that was not the entire truth.
"We can do it half and half," she said. "Your place and mine."
"You bet."
"I've talked to some people about work. That's all, just talking, feeling around. I think I could move into a practice without too much trouble."
"I'm sure you could," he said.
"I didn't tell you about it because – goddammit, quit giving me that stoic act."
"It's not an act."
"I know it's not," she said. "Fuck you."
They both drank.
"Let's take a walk," Monks said.
"The food will get cold."
"Just around the place."
"Okay," she said doubtfully.
He offered his hand. She took it. They walked down the deck's steps onto a hard red dirt path that skirted the perimeter of the property's three acres.
Thirty yards or so farther on, Monks paused, pointing at a tire-sized flat rock. "I killed a rattlesnake right there once."
Martine pulled her hand away and turned quickly in a circle, her gaze darting around the nearby earth, littered with twisted snakelike madrone twigs.
"Quit it," she said. "You're scaring me."
"I didn't want to. But the kids were still little. I couldn't take the chance."
"Did you face it hand-to-fang? Like those guys on TV?"
"Are you kidding? I snuck up behind it and whacked it with a garden hoe."
She shivered. "Are there a lot of them around? Rattlesnakes?"
"I only ever killed one other. I was getting firewood and it came out of the woodpile, between me and the door. Things got pretty tight for a minute there." Monks pointed at the woodshed, an old board-and-batten structure with only a narrow aisle between the stacks of split rounds. "The cats have taken out a few. They leave them on the doorstep."
"I didn't know cats would hunt snakes."
Another harsh image from his past seared Monks's brain – the cats on the hood of the Bronco, leaping and howling in the moonlight, while on the front seat a cobra weaved from side to side, trying to strike at them through the venom-smeared windshield.
"These cats will," he said.
They walked on, past the workout shed. It was almost dark, cool and still now, with the jays quiet. Higher up, a breeze rustled the redwood fronds and madrone leaves. A few tree frogs were tuning up for the night's concert. He walked slowly and she kept pace with him, swinging her leg without complaint. But on this rough and hilly terrain, she would get tired quickly. Monks stopped again, on the edge of the gully that led down to the creekbed.
"That old cabin down there?" he said. The neighboring place had been abandoned decades ago and had mostly fallen into the creek, a couple hundred yards down the steep hill. "I forbade the kids to go near it, but of course it was a magnet. One day, I'd worked all night and was trying to get some sleep, and I heard this shriek. I ran down there and found poor little Stephanie, she was maybe eight, screaming bloody murder. She'd jumped off something and landed on a rusty old fence post, broken off to a point, sticking a couple inches out of the ground. Went right through her tennis shoe and clear up through her foot."
Stephanie, his daughter, was now in medical school at UCSF. She and Martine had gotten quite close.
For a minute or so, Martine was silent. He could see her head moving, her gaze wandering the woods, but not turning to him.
Then, abruptly, she said, "I don't think I want a kid. My mind doesn't. I don't even think my body does. I don't know what it is."
She was forty-three. Monks was long since vasectomized and out of the child-raising mode. He did not consider that he had done all that good a job the first time around.
"Sorry I can't help you there," he said.
"No, you're not."
"You're right. I'm not."
"Have any of your women ever told you you're too honest?"
"No," Monks said. "You're the first."
"Liar."
He smiled gravely. They turned and started back. He knew, and supposed she did, too, that this had been a last-ditch attempt to woo her – offering the things that made him what he was.
When they had first been together, there were words of passion, each assuring the other that this was what they had been waiting for. But it was useless to invoke that. The problem was not any single one of the obstacles, or even all of them together. The affair was just something that had run its course, and this was like the point in a really great party that had gone on most of the night, when a silence touched the room, and everybody knew that there might be a few more drinks and laughs, but the good-byes were going to start soon.