“I’m fine, thanks.”
His expression, focused distantly on the road, was placid. “You’re probably having an affair. Even when you’re pissed as hell, it’s not like you to turn down an orgasm.”
“Maybe I’m done with both opinions and orgasms.”
He grinned. “Not you. You’re certainly hitting the wine these days, though. Maybe that has something to do with it.”
“With which part?”
“Either. I’m willing to bet it’s either chilling you out or warming you up. Our recycling bin looks like the day after a faculty party every night of the week. Maybe we
“I don’t. If you do, feel free to go. I’ll hold down the fort.”
He glanced at me. “I bet. I think the difference between you and me is that you’re still in the denial stage, and I’m starting to move past it.”
“Oh, not at all,” I said. “I didn’t deny a thing.”
For a long moment he considered that in silence. Finally he said, “Judy…it could be better than this. I think they’re going to clear me to graduate in the spring. After that I’ll take the summer off, we’ll clean up, get the last kid out of the house, take a vacation. Maybe you can get some counseling, deal with how low you’ve been since Bobbie died. We’ll both get better. Put all this crap behind us and get on with the rest of our lives.”
His words sounded sincere, but I knew Russ better than this. His first loyalty was to his ambition, and if at the moment he was turning it back toward me, it was only because he didn’t yet know to whom he would need to pay obeisance in order to resume the climb. In the vacuum of authority he could let his eyes rest for a moment on his small wife, and make me feel cruel to harden myself against the gentleness I knew from experience would not last long. Regardless of his sincerity, our dreams had diverged so completely that I could not imagine how we could share a life much longer. Russ wanted to move forward into an accomplished and respected advanced adulthood, while I yearned to fall back and back, recapturing all I had lost along the way to this place. Because I have learned that all anyone ever wants is to feel at peace with the sadness and love they have cobbled together into a life, with opportunities missed and those misguidedly taken, and for Russ that peace stretched like a ribbon between two posts lodged at a point in the future. My peace, that paltry ball of tangled wool, lay abandoned on a straw bale somewhere in a past that shifted each time I reached for it; and of all I remembered from that room full of shit and salvation, nothing had lasted except a love that was almost pure.
“I’ve already put this crap behind me,” I told Russ. “I’m already getting on with my life.”
He sighed deeply. The corner of his mouth tugged toward his ear. “Let’s not say it for now, all right?”
“Say what?”
“The D word.” I frowned, and in an exasperated voice he added, “The one that means a marriage is over.”
“That’s two D words,” I corrected. “Doctoral dissertation.”
He laughed loudly and raised a hand from the steering wheel to rub his weary eyes. “Oh, Judy,” he said. “God, how I’ve fucked it up.”
I turned and gazed out the window at the spare rural landscape, the red barns that dotted the dying fields, like chambered hearts in the midst of nothing.
21
Through the window, the barn looked little different from the houses around it: plastered white and half-timbered, with a sloping tangerine roof set with metal brackets to hold the snow. Past the dust of the barnyard, green hayfields waved all around it. She leaned her forehead against the glass and sighed. Two weeks had passed since she had last tried to visit. She passed the long days in her bedroom for the most part, lying on the floor in front of the whirring fan her father had bought for her at the PX, reading her worn copies of
“Off we go, sport,” said her father. “Ready for an adventure?”
She let the curtain drop and followed him and Kirsten out to the Mercedes. Judy climbed into the back; Kirsten took the front passenger seat. Judy scowled and curled against the opposite door, keeping her gaze on the landscape as the car rumbled off toward the village of Aichach.
They were visiting Burg Wittelsbach, a site outside the main village which Judy understood, from its name, to be a castle. Along the way her father rolled down the windows, letting in the rush of the wind, which battered Judy’s face with the scents of grass and fertilizer. The town rose up alongside the road, the staggered medieval buildings at its center flanked by modern ones. And then the land opened again into its summer splendor: ragged and stretching stalks of feed corn, lacy columns of hops climbing their trellises, combed fallow fields the color of coffee grounds. In the very middle of one of these stood a wooden crucifix as tall as a man. Its Christ suffered beneath a small peaked roof that protected him from the elements. The base of the cross stuck deep in the rich, crumbling soil, amidst the long mounds ready for the planting of cabbages. She would miss this place. All of it: the mountains and the snow, the smells of field pollens and manure, the windows thrown wide open to the air, the imposition of nature. The imposition of God.
They turned onto a smaller road and came to a very old church. Her father parked not far from it and opened the trunk to retrieve his walking stick—a shining length of knotty wood covered in the small souvenir medallions collected by German hiking enthusiasts. They set out in the direction of the church and then hiked into the woods, where the thin trees grew straight and dense toward the sun, some burdened with lush bands of clinging ivy. Ahead of her Kirsten walked in her boxy, methodical way, skirt swinging like a cowbell. The fabric, white and sprigged with flowers in Easter-egg colors, was the same as the dress her friend had been wearing in the barn. Kirsten wore an apron over hers, knotted demurely on the left side, to indicate she was single.
“Here we are,” her father said, as they arrived at a large block of granite covered in moss. “This marks where the castle used to be.”
Judy screwed up her face. “You mean there’s no castle?”
