sign up for birthing classes together? All three of us?”
“I guess so,” I said. “Why not?”
“I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.”
She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction.
“Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared behind us. A truck honked its hydraulic horn, a monstrous, oceanic sound. Clare shook her head, not in denial but in exasperation. Because she could think of nothing else to do, she began walking again, more slowly, toward the row of trees.
PART III
BOBBY
THE CITY’S pleasures were too complicated for raising a kid. They were too wound up with rot. I thought so, and Jonathan did, too. Clare was less sure—she worried that the baby might grow up with its imagination damaged by too much ease.
“What if it turns out to be some sort of Heidi?” she said. “I don’t want any child of mine growing up
I reminded her of what New York has ready for anyone too small or uninformed to do battle for a body-sized patch of air rights. I invented probability numbers about small-town schools and the effects of the color green on psychological development.
“And listen, growing up in the country doesn’t doom anybody to good behavior anymore,” Jonathan said. “Most of the really interesting murderers come from derelict farms and trailer parks.”
“Well, all right,” Clare finally said. “I guess everybody needs New York to escape
And so we started making phone calls. We started driving upstate to look at property so strange or desolate we could afford it with Clare’s inheritance money. Shopping for cheap real estate, you get an insider’s look at daily human defeat. You smell the dank, vegetable smell of the outdoors working its way in through soggy wallboards, see ceilings and floors in a slow-motion state of ongoing collapse. You see how weather and decay win just by continuing, day after day, until the money runs out.
“We can’t stop too long to think,” Clare kept saying. “We have to keep looking. If we stop and think too long, I’m afraid I’ll come to my senses.”
After three weeks we found a two-story brown house five miles out of Woodstock, a place with a motherly, slightly insane dignity whose advantages mostly balanced its faults. Its walls stood on a solid foundation. The price was low—a desperation sale. Light from an alfalfa field floated through the rooms as if the passage of time was man’s silliest delusion. Well water clear and cold as virtue itself flowed from the taps.
On the debit side, the wiring had disintegrated and the pipes had gone lacy with rust. The old pine floors were alive with dry rot and carpenter ants.
“At least this one has a soul,” Jonathan said. “You know what I mean? I feel like it’s not too late. This one isn’t dead in the water yet.”
Clare nodded. She ran her thumb along a doorjamb, and looked with critical uncertainty at her thumb.
“It feels right,” I said. “Don’t you get a feeling from this place?”
“Mm-hm,” Clare said. “Nausea. Vertigo. Panic.” She kept looking at her thumb.
We argued for a week, and bought the house. We bought the well and the afternoon light. We bought fifteen oaks, eight pines, a blackberry thicket, and a pair of graves so old the markers had been worn smooth as chalk. As Clare sat pregnant on a green vinyl chair signing the papers she said, “So long, Paris and Istanbul.”
Jonathan added, “So long, Armani. So long, crocodile shoes.” The two of them shared a sour little laugh. And then the deal was made. Clare had bought us all a fresh start with her dead grandfather’s rhinestone fortune. By way of celebration, the real estate agent gave us complimentary white wine in white Styrofoam cups.
When we left our New York apartment we got rid of everything worn out or broken—nearly half our possessions. We put them out on the street as offerings for the people who were just arriving, full of hope, at the place we were about to leave. We watched from the window as passers-by carried things away. A woman took the lava lamp. Two skinheads and a fat tattooed girl took the swaybacked sofa covered in leopard-skin polyester.
“So long, treasures,” Clare said. Her breath made a spool-shaped flicker of steam on the glass.
“So long, old garbage from thrift-store bins,” Jonathan said. “Honey, there are times when nostalgia is simply not called for.”
“I dragged that sofa down here from Sixty-seventh Street,” she said. “Years ago, with Stephen Cooper and Little Bill. We’d carry the damn thing a few blocks, stop and sit on it, then walk another few blocks. It took us all night. Sometimes bag people would sit on it with us, and we’d all have a beer. We made a lot of friends that night.”
“And now you’re a homeowner and a mother-to-be,” Jonathan said. “Did you really expect to scavenge around the streets of New York for the rest of your life?”
“Little Bill died,” she said. “Did I tell you?”
“No.”
“Corinne told me. He died in South Carolina, oh, at least a year ago. We’d all lost track of him.”
“I’m sorry. Is Stephen all right?”
“Oh, Stephen’s fine. He really did open a jewelry store up on Cape Cod. I suppose he’s making a mint selling little gold whales and sea gulls to tourists.”
“Well,” Jonathan said. “That’s good. I mean, at least he’s alive.”
“Mm-hm.”
We watched the sofa travel down East Fourth Street. On the sidewalk below our window, a man and a woman in leather jackets whooped over Clare’s old kitchen clock—a yellow plastic boomerang shape covered with pink-and-red electrons.
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into throwing out the clock,” she said. “I’m going to go down there and tell those people it was a mistake.”
“Forget it,” Jonathan said. “They’d kill you.”
“Jonathan, that clock is a collector’s item. It’s worth money.”
“Sweetie, it doesn’t run,” he said. “It doesn’t tell time anymore. Let them have it.”
She nodded, and watched numbly as the couple jogged away toward First Avenue, passing the clock back and forth like a football. She stroked her pregnant belly. She breathed steam onto the glass.
That was over ten months ago. Now we live in a field facing the mountains. Spiky blue flowers climb through the slats of our fence. Bees drone in their ecstasy of daily work, and a milk-blue sky hangs raggedly behind the trees. These are old mountains. They’ve been worn down by wind and rain. They are not about anarchy or grandeur, like the more photogenic ranges. These mountains throw a smooth shadow—their crags don’t imply the gnash of continental plates. They are evenly bearded with pine trees. They cut modest half-moons out of the sky.
“I hate scenery,” Clare says. “It’s so obvious.” She is standing beside me in the unmowed grass. It’s the first April of the new decade and she’s a new Clare. She’s sharper now, with more true bite under her jokes. You’d expect motherhood to have had a softening effect.
“Aw, come on,” I tell her. “Get over it, huh?”
A pair of crows glide over the house. One lets out a raucous cry, like metal twisting on metal.
“Buzzards,” Clare says. “Carrion-eaters. Waiting for the first of us to die of boredom.”
