“Sometimes.”
“I think about it a lot.”
“You know something I think about? When I was on the sand and I woke up, I remember how bright the sun was and how good it felt to look up into the sky and it was like I could feel everything all around me. And then I felt your hands on my chest and I could see you and I could see the sun and the sky and I felt good, Johnny. That’s what I remember, I felt good. I didn’t always feel good later, but when I felt bad, when I couldn’t understand something or when the kids were teasing me, I remembered that-the sun and feeling everything all around me.”
Stan’s dance lesson was in a clapboard community hall that stood alongside a church in a residential street north of Back Town. The hall had a concrete area out front for parking that was about two-thirds full of small cars. Several old people were tottering across it toward a set of open double doors.
Stan wanted me to come in and watch him but my visit to the lake had jarred loose too many memories and there was something else I wanted to do. He sulked a little until I promised I’d come back before he finished.
The Channon was southeast back over the Swallow River and was about as far away from Old Town as you could get and still say you lived in Oakridge. It was an area of light forest that held a scatter of small, widely spaced houses. A place where the rents were low and people kept to themselves.
Marla’s house was a two-bedroom wooden bungalow a few minutes drive into the area. It was screened from the road by a hedge and separated from its closest neighbor by twenty yards of trees. I drove slowly past it. A driveway ran down the left side of the house and from what I could see through the gap it made in the hedge, it didn’t look like anyone was home. There was no car out front and the glass of the windows was flat and dark.
I parked the pickup a hundred yards further on and walked back along the road, my hand tight around a set of keys I carried in my pocket. These keys had been with me through all my time in London-two for my father’s house, one for the wooden bungalow I was now approaching.
The front of the house had not changed. When Marla and I had found the place the window frames and the front door with its pebbled glass window had been white, but on our second day there we’d painted them red to mark the exuberance we felt at finally making our home together. I was twenty-one and Marla had just left Gareth for me-scratch one friend, gain one lover.
I wasn’t sure if she still lived there. I’d written to her after I left Oakridge and she’d replied for a while, but her letters had been full of accusations and sadness and after a year she’d stopped writing back. Since then the only news I’d had of her had come in the rare letters or e-mails my father and I exchanged. Even the letter I’d sent telling her I was coming back to Oakridge had gone unanswered. But somehow it didn’t seem possible that I would not have known if she’d moved. It was reassuring that the window frames and the door were still red.
I walked quietly down the side of the house, looked through what had been our bedroom window, and saw immediately that I’d been right-this was still Marla’s house. The room was still a bedroom, it even held the same bed and dresser. And on the dresser, a framed snapshot of Marla and me posing at some picnic spot on the Swallow River.
I went back to the front of the house. I knocked on the door and waited a long time and knocked again but no one answered. I looked around me. None of the other houses in the street could see into Marla’s front yard. So I took her key out of my pocket and pushed it into the lock and turned it and opened the door. I stood on the threshold for a full minute, listening, then I stepped through and closed the door quietly behind me.
Memory drove into me like a truck-the polished wooden floor of the hallway, the two bedrooms on the left, the living room on the right, kitchen and bathroom at the back. Even the smell of the place carried signatures of my time there-hot wood, air heated through glass. This house and the relationship that went with it had been one of the landmark abandonings of my exit from Oakridge.
The past reached out to me from every room-from shelves I had assembled and screwed to a wall, from hooks I had put in the backs of doors, from a hinge I had clumsily fixed with a nail… The house was not a morgue for our time together, though. My ghost was there, but it was buried under eight years of her own living and showed through only in small patches, as though in painting on the layers of the present, time had missed a bit here and there.
I tried to guess what her life had been like since I’d been gone. It was obvious she had not become wealthy or even comfortable-there was not the accumulation of new possessions that would indicate eight years of stable finances. Had she found another man? I looked for signs and to my relief found none. There was, however, one change to the house I could not decipher.
We had always used the second bedroom as a storage room, had rarely ever gone into it. Now it was empty of household junk and held instead a double bed made up with dark blue sheets and a quilt. At first, I thought Marla must have taken a boarder, but there was too little in the room to point to regular occupancy. Apart from the bed there was only a small dresser and a wall mirror. But still, there was a fragrance of use here, a sensory mark that made me think the bed was sometimes used, that the mirror was occasionally looked into.
I pulled back the covers of the bed. They had not been recently washed and the smell of sex rose from them. Dusty smears of dried semen stood out against the dark material. I opened the drawers of the dresser. The top one held a set of lacy black woman’s underwear and a bottle of personal lubricant. The other two were empty.
I was closing the drawers when I heard a car pull into the yard out front. If it was Marla I didn’t want our first meeting to be like this. If it was anyone else I doubly didn’t want to be found in the house. I bolted from the room, down the short hall to the kitchen. There was a back door there that opened onto a small garden. I unlatched it and stood waiting, ready to run. The size of the house meant that to have any chance of escaping undetected I’d have to wait until whoever had just arrived opened the front door and stepped inside. The moment they did this I’d race down the side of the house and out onto the road. And hope that whoever it was didn’t look out of any windows while I was doing it.
A minute passed and I didn’t hear steps on the porch or the scrape of a key in the lock. It occurred to me then that the driver of the car may well have just been using Marla’s driveway to make a turn.
I pulled the back door shut, cursing myself for this insane act of unlawful entry. I left the kitchen and crept along the hall to the living room. There, mercifully, the curtains were half drawn and by staying close to the wall I was able to work my way around the room and look through the window at an angle that showed most of the area in front of the house without exposing myself.
The noise I had heard had not been that of a turning car. Sitting smoking a cigarette in her olive Mercedes was the woman I had met at the nursery that morning-Patricia Prentice, the jittery, unhappy-looking wife of Stan’s boss. As I stood watching her, a second car pulled into the yard and parked.
My mother died in a car wreck when I was sixteen and from then until I left Oakridge I’d never known my father to be with another woman. He had loved my mother in his distant, battened-down way and I always figured his sense of what was right had prevented him from looking for anyone else. But it seemed that eight more years of being without a woman had eroded this sense of rightness just a little, because the second car was his and he was standing now, holding Patricia, cupping her breast and running his other hand down her back to her buttocks.
It was shocking to watch him touch another person so intimately. It was so far beyond my frame of reference for him that by witnessing it I felt I was stealing something from him, some charged emotional possession that should have been his alone to know about.
I didn’t have long enough to really start feeling bad about it, though, because the kiss and the touching ended and Patricia and my father headed toward the porch. I crept along the hall to the kitchen and stood by the back door until I heard a key turn and footsteps cross the threshold. And then I ran, crouching low, out into the back garden, around the corner, and along the side of the house. I stopped for a moment at the edge of the front yard, scanning the place where the cars were parked, but it was clear, my father and Patricia were in the house and the door was closed behind them. I walked quickly out to the road and back along it to my truck.
As I drove away I suffered the unsettling realization that the semen I had seen on the dark sheets of the bed in the spare room must have been my father’s.
The hall where Stan was dancing was a pretty basic affair-a stretch of bare floorboards, a curtainless stage at one end, a piano and several stacks of orange plastic chairs pushed into a corner. Almost all the people there appeared to be in their sixties or seventies and I couldn’t help wondering if this gathering was less a lesson than
