“I’m still working on the larger issues,” I said, “but until I figure it out, that sounds great.”
He went to work in the kitchen as I sat at the counter and watched. He was about six feet two inches tall, the top of his head barely a hand’s width from the ceiling. He got water going, salted it, then liberally sprinkled the burger with various herbs from jars on my shelves, onion and garlic powder, finely chopped scallions. To mix it all, he put his hands into the bowl and squelched the meat between his fingers until they became so clogged with clinging fat that he had to stop and scrape it off with a fork.
“See what I mean?” He scowled at the mash he’d made. “My ex did all the cooking. Any skills I have are left over from my bachelor days. Spaghetti, scrambled eggs, and peanut butter sandwiches. And beer. I can pop a top with the best of them.”
“Speaking of the ex, how’s that going?” I asked.
“Settled. Papers signed, sealed, delivered. The problem remains my daughter. It’s not that I’m deemed unacceptable as a parent, just that my schedule is so uneven. Also, she’s in second grade in Rutland and I need to be up here for now. Hard for her to come out here except on weekends, and even that’s hit and miss with my schedule. So. For now it’s me visiting her when time permits.”
He got quiet and distant for a moment as he poured tomato sauce into a pan; then he brightened. “The ex has a boyfriend, though!”
“Is that a good thing, or—”
“Are you kidding? I’m thrilled! Distracts her from thinking up new ways to make my life miserable. Puts her in a better mood. She’s been a lot more agreeable since they got together.”
“That’s great!” I thought back to my own divorce and remembered my initial feelings—no, my feelings for at least the first year—toward Matt: I’d have liked to dissect him and his girlfriends with a dull spoon. But thinking about it just then, all that heat and heartache and wrangle, seemed unfathomable to me—childish, boring, an unpleasant but mercifully short chapter of my life. Was it just the passage of time, I wondered, or had some other change moved me beyond and above crap like that?
“So,” he said, “my latest masterpiece. Not on contract, just my own thing. Been working on it since spring, thought you might like to see it.”
He dumped the spaghetti sticks into the boiling water, put the sauce on simmer, scrubbed his hands to get rid of the grease, and joined me at the counter. He produced a shiny unlabeled DVD, slid it in, and started the show.
It opened with a shot of my forested hill, of all things, as seen from the hop yard. Then the camera panned slowly down; the top of the trellis appeared, then the tips of midsummer bines, stirring in a gentle breeze. Suddenly the frame moved quickly downward to a midshot of my brother flipping the bird to the camera. There was no sound.
It moved on to a wonderful montage of vignettes from the hop yard. Here was Jason, the chubbier of the Vermont Tech kids, bent to work planting rhizomes, with a more-than-generous view of his exposed rear, pink above his jeans. He turned and made as if to punch the camera. Then, seen through a gap in younger bines in one of the lanes, Bailey-not-Tim and Jennifer, who everybody knew were having an affair that they were inexplicably trying to keep secret. Bailey grabbed her and tried to kiss her; Jennifer shoved him away, laughing and looking over her shoulder to see whether somebody might be watching. I could read her lips: “Cut it out!”
Then came a series of rapid-fire shots that had me laughing helplessly: all the men, at one time or another, urine-marking the border of the yard. Will had done a discreet job, never getting a frontal shot, but the streams were often visible and the postures unmistakable. Each lasted about two seconds and faded into a similar shot of another of the crew, and another, and another, speeding up until it seemed as if the enterprise must have occupied every minute of the summer, that a tsunami must surely have descended on the yard. Even Bob had a couple of cameos, doing his part.
I screeched with laughter, something I’d done only when Cat got on a comic roll. “Fabulous!” I told Will. “Perfect. Brilliant.”
“It changes a bit,” he said.
By degrees, the tone of the video segued from silly to simply amusing to pleasantly rural to more serious, capturing portraits of the people at the farm, busy with their work. Here was Brassard, sweaty, holding his Agri-Mark hat off his head to scratch his scalp as he puzzled over something problematic. He turned to catch Will filming, mouthed, “Don’t you have something better to do?” But after a scene of Earnest flinging huge sections of tree trunk off his truck—eventually to become part of the winter’s firewood supply—there was Brassard again, climbing down from the Deere with the wincing carefulness of a man whose knees were killing him. Then Earnest, shirt off, skin sweat-sheened and oil-smeared, muscles balling as he cranked a wrench on the cone separator. I thought it was an aesthetically effective shot, a Rodin of man and machine, force brought against resistance, defined by the play of light on surfaces.
Next, a woman doing cow flow, lightly swatting the back end of a lagger, calling over the backs of
