two days, with the sugar oozing out of the meringue. A bottle of Seconal. There was a drinking glass, a container of warm juice . . . I don’t remember.
We used to make love in the tent. I’d go over to see him, open the front door, and crawl in. That summer he collapsed the tents, threw them in his car, and left for Maine.
“Go on,” Noel says.
I shrug. I’ve told this story twice before, and this is always my stopping place.
“That’s it,” I say to Noel.
He continues to wait expectantly, just as he did the two other times he heard the story.
One evening, we get a phone call from Lark. There is a house near them for sale—only thirty thousand dollars. What Noel can’t fix, Charles and Sol can help with. There are ten acres of land, a waterfall. Noel is wild to move there. But what are we going to do for money, I ask him. He says we’ll worry about that in a year or so, when we run out. But we haven’t even seen the place, I point out. But this is a fabulous find, he says. We’ll go see it this weekend. Noel has Beth so excited that she wants to start school in Vermont on Monday, not come back to the city at all. We will just go to the house right this minute and live there forever.
But does he know how to do the wiring? Is he sure it can be wired?
“Don’t you have any faith in me?” he says. “David always thought I was a chump, didn’t he?”
“I’m only asking whether you can do such complicated things.”
My lack of faith in Noel has made him unhappy. He leaves the room without answering. He probably remembers—and knows that I remember—the night he asked David if he could see what was wrong with the socket of his floor lamp. David came back to our apartment laughing. “The plug had come out of the outlet,” he said.
In early April, David comes to visit us in Vermont for the weekend with his girlfriend, Patty. She wears blue jeans, and has kohl around her eyes. She is twenty years old. Her clogs echo loudly on the bare floorboards. She seems to feel awkward here. David seems not to feel awkward, although he looked surprised when Beth called him David. She led him through the woods, running ahead of Noel and me, to show him the waterfall. When she got too far ahead, I called her back, afraid, for some reason, that she might die. If I lost sight of her, she might die. I suppose I had always thought that if David and I spent time together again it would be over the hospital bed of our dying daughter—something like that.
Patty has trouble walking in the woods; the clogs flop off her feet in the brush. I tried to give her a pair of my sneakers, but she wears size 81/2 and I am a 7. Another thing to make her feel awkward.
David breathes in dramatically. “Quite a change from the high rise we used to live in,” he says to Noel.
Calculated to make us feel rotten?
“You used to live in a high rise?” Patty asks.
He must have just met her. She pays careful attention to everything he says, watches with interest when he snaps off a twig and breaks it in little pieces. She is having trouble keeping up. David finally notices her difficulty in keeping up with us, and takes her hand. They’re city people; they don’t even have hiking boots.
“It seems as if that was in another life,” David says. He snaps off a small branch and flicks one end of it against his thumb.
“There’s somebody who says that every time we sleep we die; we come back another person, to another life,” Patty says.
“Kafka as realist,” Noel says.
Noel has been reading all winter. He has read Brautigan, a lot of Borges, and has gone from Dante to Garcia Marquez to Hilma Wolitzer to Kafka. Sometimes I ask him why he is going about it this way. He had me make him a list—this writer before that one, which poems are early, which late, which famous. Well, it doesn’t matter. Noel is happy in Vermont. Being in Vermont means that he can do what he wants to do. Freedom, you know. Why should I make fun of it? He loves his books, loves roaming around in the woods outside the house, and he buys more birdseed than all the birds in the North could eat. He took a Polaroid picture of our salt lick for the deer when he put it in, and admired both the salt lick (“They’ve been here!”) and his picture. Inside the house there are Polaroids of the woods, the waterfall, some rabbits—he tacks them up with pride, the way Beth hangs up the pictures she draws in school. “You know,” Noel said to me one night, “when Gatsby is talking to Nick Carraway and he says, ‘In any case, it was just personal’—what does that mean?”
“When did you read
“Last night, in the bathtub.”
As we turn to walk back, Noel points out the astonishing number of squirrels in the trees around us. By David’s expression, he thinks Noel is pathetic.
I look at Noel. He is taller than David but more stooped; thinner than David, but his slouch disguises it. Noel has big hands and feet and a sharp nose. His scarf is gray, with frayed edges. David’s is bright red, just bought. Poor Noel. When David called to say he and Patty were coming for a visit, Noel never thought of saying no. And he asked me how he could compete with David. He thought David was coming to his house to win me away. After he reads more literature he’ll realize that is too easy. There will have to be complexities. The complexities will protect him forever. Hours after David’s call, he said (to himself, really—not to me) that David was bringing a woman with him. Surely that meant he wouldn’t try anything.
Charles and Margaret come over just as we are finishing dinner, bringing a mattress we are borrowing for David and Patty to sleep on. They are both stoned, and are dragging the mattress on the ground, which is white with a late snow. They are too stoned to hoist it.
“Eventide,” Charles says. A circular black barrette holds his hair out of his face. Margaret lost her hat to Lark some time ago and never got around to borrowing another one. Her hair is dusted with snow. “We have to go,” Charles says, weighing her hair in his hands, “before the snow woman melts.”
Sitting at the kitchen table late that night, I turn to David. “How are you doing?” I whisper.
“A lot of things haven’t been going the way I figured,” he whispers.
