I couldn’t blame them. I had let my personal life interfere; my control had slipped. I looked like hell, with bags under my eyes, split ends, lost weight. I walked around in an exhausted haze from the emotional wear and tear, and by then I was preoccupied with the hellish logistics of the divorce endgame: doing the awful paperwork, sorting possessions, finding a new place to live. During that last term, my colleagues’ responses segued from sympathy to concern to professional disapproval, to a subtle ostracism as, one by one, they distanced themselves from the contaminated one. I lost some good friends because, when they tried to offer condolences or advice, I told them they could shove it up their condescending asses.
As bad as my external circumstances were, the internal ramifications of the Omar event were worse. I had started to trust him, assumed that it was reciprocal. I had started to enjoy our afternoon chats and believed he did, too. And his betrayal, his exploitation of these simple faiths, echoed everything Matt had done. It reiterated the duplicity, cruelty, disrespect—the whole Dumpster of disappointments and disillusionments. It branded me with an unhappy outlook on life in general and my life in particular.
That pathetic episode—not so much what I had done as what I’d felt—constituted a rude awakening. Was I really so desperate that I needed, and could take, affirmation from a fifteen-year-old boy? Was I really so lonely or hungry that I couldn’t resist the need for physical contact? When I felt his hand slip to my rump, my response should have been instantaneous, but what I really felt was a sort of helpless puzzlement about the sensation that seemed to deserve a couple of seconds to process.
It sickened me that I had let myself become such a miserable wreck, had let a creep like Matt, or Omar, jerk me around, let myself become that vulnerable, that weak. When I left for the Vermont woods, I wanted to get the hell out of there. I wanted to punish myself, and I wanted some goddamned hardship that would toughen me up enough that I would never ever get so lost and so weak.
Chapter 10
Which at least partly explains why, despite the increasingly clear hopelessness of my little experiment, I didn’t leave right away. I had burned every bridge behind me, and my past seemed too spoiled to return to. I had acquired a Pavlovian aversion to Boston and the person I had become there.
Also, it seemed that every time I made up my mind, something would offer an argument for staying.
A few days after Cat left, I awoke to another brilliantly clear day. Up here they have a saying: “Don’t like the weather in Vermont? Wait ten minutes.” There had been a little shower during the night, which now brought up the wonderful smell of soil from the forest floor. The leaves glistened, and the morning’s negligent breezes brought down an irregular patter of heavy drops from the tree canopy. The forest seemed pleased with itself, like a cat after it has groomed its coat satisfactorily.
I was sitting on my fireside log, listening to the day as I blew across the top of a cup of instant coffee. I was missing Cat and wondering gloomily at my meandering life, when I heard a voice call from below: “Are you decent?” It was Earnest.
I checked. I had put on running shorts and a dirty T-shirt, and I had been scratching at the blackfly bites on my ankles, leaving red welts. “As much as I’ll ever be,” I called back.
A moment later he came into the clearing, wearing a khaki T-shirt and army pants and a Castro-esque hat tipped back on his head. He tossed himself down, at his ease on the ground across the fire pit from me.
“Too late to meet your friend, I guess. Too bad. Diz says she’s a real firecracker.”
“That she is. You’d like her. You want coffee?”
“No, just drank a quart of it down below. So … what’s on your clock for today, Pilgrim?”
I had been asking myself the same thing. “Sounds like you have a suggestion.”
“I’ve got a problem that I’m hoping you’ll help me with. It’s a paying proposition.”
His regular assistant for his tree surgery business had called in sick—most likely hungover, Earnest thought. He’d called others, with no luck, so he was desperate for someone to help him bring down a big tree in Essex Junction. When he described the job—a huge old elm in someone’s backyard—I warned him that I had brought down only a few trees in my life, all of them in the past month, none of them thicker than my arm. I doubted I should help with a tree near a house.
He dismissed my concerns with a wave. “All it takes is brains and brawn and good luck,” he told me.
Working for Earnest: Caravanned behind him up to Essex, left my car at the park-and-ride near the interstate, rode in his big truck—not his regular pickup but an old warhorse of a stake-sided dump truck—out to a suburban residential district. Big trees along the streets, including some elms that had miraculously survived the midcentury blight. They were going one by one, Earnest explained, and today we were going to take down a behemoth that had started dropping branches on a house.
Earnest was in an ebullient mood, his big face shiny. He drove with a huge thermos of coffee in one hand, handing it to me to share occasional swigs, and explained that if this went as he hoped, he’d make out like a bandit and I would get a generous cut.
When we pulled up at the client’s house, I saw that the old elm was truly a monument. Its massive branches rose and curved up and out in the shape of an inverted umbrella or the bell of a trumpet, overhanging the house
