I nod. We are drinking white wine and eating cheddar-cheese soup. The soup is scalding. Clouds of steam rise from the bowl, and I keep my face away from it, worrying that the steam will make my eyes water, and that David will misinterpret.
“Not really things. People,” David whispers, bobbing an ice cube up and down in his wineglass with his index finger.
“What people?”
“It’s better not to talk about it. They’re not really people you know.”
That hurts, and he knew it would hurt. But climbing the stairs to go to bed I realize that, in spite of that, it’s a very reasonable approach.
Tonight, as I do most nights, I sleep with long johns under my nightgown. I roll over on top of Noel for more warmth and lie there, as he has said, like a dead man, like a man in the Wild West, gunned down in the dirt. Noel jokes about this. “Pow, pow,” he whispers sleepily as I lower myself on him. “Poor critter’s deader ’n a doornail.” I lie there warming myself. What does he want with me?
“What do you want for your birthday?” I ask.
He recites a little list of things he wants. He whispers: a bookcase, an aquarium, a blender to make milkshakes in.
“That sounds like what a ten-year-old would want,” I say.
He is quiet too long; I have hurt his feelings.
“Not the bookcase,” he says finally.
I am falling asleep. It’s not fair to fall asleep on top of him. He doesn’t have the heart to wake me and has to lie there with me sprawled on top of him until I fall off. Move, I tell myself, but I don’t.
“Do you remember this afternoon, when Patty and I sat on the rock to wait for you and David and Beth?”
I remember. We were on top of the hill, Beth pulling David by his hand, David not very interested in what she was going to show him, Beth ignoring his lack of interest and pulling him along. I ran to catch up, because she was pulling him so hard, and I caught Beth’s free arm and hung on, so that we formed a chain.
“I knew I’d seen that before,” Noel says. “I just realized where—when the actor wakes up after the storm and sees Death leading those people winding across the hilltop in
Six years ago. Seven. David and I were in the Village, in the winter, looking in a bookstore window. Tires began to squeal, and we turned around and were staring straight at a car, a ratty old blue car that had lifted a woman from the street into the air. The fall took much too long; she fell the way snow drifts—the big flakes that float down, no hurry at all. By the time she hit, though, David had pushed my face against his coat, and while everyone was screaming—it seemed as if a whole chorus had suddenly assembled to scream—he had his arms around my shoulders, pressing me so close that I could hardly breathe and saying, “If anything happened to you . . . If anything happened to you . . .”
When they leave, it is a clear, cold day. I give Patty a paper bag with half a bottle of wine, two sandwiches, and some peanuts to eat on the way back. The wine is probably not a good idea; David had three glasses of vodka and orange juice for breakfast. He began telling jokes to Noel—dogs in bars outsmarting their owners, constipated whores, talking fleas. David does not like Noel; Noel does not know what to make of David.
Now David rolls down the car window. Last-minute news. He tells me that his sister has been staying in his apartment. She aborted herself and has been very sick. “Abortions are legal,” David says. “Why did she do that?” I ask how long ago it happened. A month ago, he says. His hands drum on the steering wheel. Last week, Beth got a box of wooden whistles carved in the shape of peasants from David’s sister. Noel opened the kitchen window and blew softly to some birds on the feeder. They all flew away.
Patty leans across David. “There are so many animals here, even in the winter,” she says. “Don’t they hibernate anymore?”
She is making nervous, polite conversation. She wants to leave. Noel walks away from me to Patty’s side of the car, and tells her about the deer who come right up to the house. Beth is sitting on Noel’s shoulders. Not wanting to talk to David, I wave at her stupidly. She waves back.
David looks at me out the window. I must look as stiff as one of those wooden whistles, all carved out of one piece, in my old blue ski jacket and blue wool hat pulled down to my eyes and my baggy jeans.
“
“Yes,” Patty says. “It was nice of you to do this.” She holds up the bag.
It’s a steep driveway, and rocky. David backs down cautiously—the way someone pulls a zipper after it’s been caught. We wave, they disappear. That was easy.
Downhill
Walking the dog at 7:30 a.m., I sit on the wet grass by the side of the road, directly across from the beaver pond and diagonally across from the graveyard. In back of me is a grapevine that I snitch from. The grapes are bitter. The dog lifts a leg on the gravestone, rolls in dead squirrel in the road, comes to my side finally—thank God none of the commuters ran over him—and licks my wrist. The wet wrist feels awful. I rub it along his back, passing it off as a stroke. I do it several times. “Please don’t leave me,” I say to the dog, who cocks his head and settles in the space between my legs on the grass.
My mother writes Jon this letter:
“Oh, John, we are so happy that September marks the beginning of your last year in law school. My husband said to me Saturday (we were at the Turkish restaurant we took you and Maria to when she was recuperating— the one you both liked so much) that now when he gets mad he can say, ‘I’ll sue!’ and mean it. It has been uphill for so long, and now it will be downhill.”
Curiously, that week an old friend of Jon’s sent us a toy—a small bent-kneed skier who, when placed at the top of a slanting board, would glide to the bottom. I tried to foul up the toy every which way. I even tried making it ski on sandpaper, and it still worked. I tacked the sandpaper to a board, and down it went. The friend had bought it in Switzerland, where he and his wife were vacationing. So said the note in the package that was addressed to
