Northwest Corner Read online

  Afterward, he sets her down gingerly—as if, now that it’s finished, she, like the moon, might break into pieces. In silence, they pull up and refasten their clothes. The left side of his jaw scarlet where she scratched him. She isn’t sorry. She’s swimming with him, leaking him into her underwear, smelling him with every breath, shaking so badly that Sam has to cover her with his body like a blanket. Not cold anymore, finally not anything. He lifts the hair that’s fallen over her face and kisses her there between her eyes—such a tender, mature, manlike thing to do that she has to wonder who, by fucking each other, they’ve just become.

  DWIGHT

  SAM IS STILL CONKED OUT at eight the next morning as I stand in my kitchen, facing the open refrigerator. Food reserves totally inadequate for long-term occupancy, it must be said, or even guest residency by more than a single individual. Though I’m not thinking very straight about the matter, having been up since half past five, rattling around in my sun-filled cage like a lab hamster, waiting for my son to emerge from his room.

  So that I might offer him what, exactly? A fatherly speech? A morning hug? A plan for living? Almost a relief that he continues to sleep—as tired, it seems, as if he walked all the way from Connecticut. And yet still the note I leave for him on the kitchen table rambles on too long about murky topics that have nothing to do, let’s face it, with breakfast. Topics like family and the future. I give my cell number in case he has questions or simply wants to check in while I’m out (unlikely). Tell him that I’ll be back in an hour and look forward to having breakfast together. That he should think of mi casa as su casa for as long as he feels like staying. Maybe we’ll talk more over dinner about his plans, such as they are, though absolutely no pressure to cannonball into the familial deep end all at once if he’s not in the mood. By now I’m on the back side of the page ripped from the SoCal memo pad, and it’s time—even I can see—to bring this baby home. Keep the tone light and parent-friendly, but not too. After lengthy deliberations with myself, I sign the note “Dad,” which is simple fact, but cautiously leave out “love”: I don’t want to antagonize my son or, in truth, to dredge up recollections (unwanted, I feel certain, by both of us) that might lead him to the judgment that I’ve yet again failed to earn something out. There’ll be opportunity enough for that. My handwriting, jacked up on a second cup of black, is jittery, as if possessed.

  Then, before leaving the house, I call my boss at home. An early riser, Tony will already have worked out in his home gym and be seated now in the family breakfast nook with the L.A. Times, a mug of coffee, and a bowl of Go Lean cereal with nonfat milk. (It’s a depressing verity that every man of a certain age knows with self-absorbed precision the dreary, hope-to-live-forever routines of other men in middle life—hard-won knowledge, I might add, that gets us precisely nowhere.) On the wall above Tony’s head are framed color photos (most professionally snapped) of the Lopez family at work and play, arranged in an artful mosaic. All in all, it’s as pleasant a morning stage set as one could hope for.

  One of the girls picks up and chirps “Hi” through a mouthful of something or other.

  “Hey there. That Ruby?”

  “It’s Jade.” Voice snippy: mixing up the twins is not the path to their hearts.

  “Oh, right. Sorry. Hey, Jade, it’s Dwight Arno.”

  “Dad! Dwight Arno!”

  “Mister Arno, honey,” I hear Tony murmur as the phone transfer gets made. “The store?” This to me, and all business. “Morning, Tony.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Everything’s fine with the store.”

  “You sure?” I can hear his fingers drumming the table and Jodi telling one of the girls to clear her plate. “You know I get tense when I’m not expecting the call.”

  “Sorry. Everything’s fine. Just calling ’cause I need the day off.”

  “You sick?”

  “My son’s here.”

  “Who?”

  “My son. Sam. From Connecticut?”

  “Yeah, yeah …” Tony’s recall process virtually audible this morning. “Hold on—isn’t he, like—?”

  “He showed up at my house last night.”

  “Just showed up? Whoa, man—big surprise, no? He okay and everything?”

  “He’s okay. Thing is, he might be staying awhile. And I just, you know, I need to get him settled.”

  “I get it. Family, right?”

  “Right. Family.”

  “You know me, I’m a family man, Dwight. So anyway, I was going in myself this morning. I’ll open up.”

  “Thanks.”

  I hear him sip his coffee, turn a page of the paper. “See that piece on Dateline last night? East Coast parents all got kids learning squash so they can get ’em into the Ivy League?”

  “Missed that.”

  “Something to think about—West Coast squash-clinic thing. Move some merchandise. Folks out here want Ivy League, too, right? Maybe build some courts. We’ll talk about it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. Later.”

  As usual after a conversation with Tony in which I’ve had to ask for a favor of some kind, I hang up feeling that I’ve somehow neglected to make some key point on behalf of my own dignity. What the point might have been, I can’t figure. A gnatty cloud of frustration hovers over me. I sit with it for a time, then slip on my shades and exit the house. I lower the top of the Sebring and drive across town, my arm out and the sun on my face.

  And the joggers jog, God bless them, and the sprinklers don’t quit, and gulls fly over the marina and the beaches. And I go to the Vons at the shopping center like any red- or blue- or purple-blooded American. Get my four-wheeled cart and roll it down the bright six-foot-wide aisles, filling it with basics and sundries and the occasional frozen-dessert treat. Fill it right to the brim. Run my plastic quick and easy through the reader and clock my debt ($169.87) without so much as a flinch. Because this morning, with my son miraculously asleep in my house, my vision feels huge. Or I need it to be. I want to save my mind for the truly important questions. (Which are?) Refusing today to be brought down to the usual zero-sum state by the bad-news details of the everyday, the shocking price of milk or the one broken egg out of a brand-new dozen. These things happen; they don’t have to be personal. Run your card and get on with it, man. Pay the minimum at the end of the month. This is our beautiful way of life.

  And then a stop on the road home for gas. And—hell, why not?—I throw in another fifteen bucks for a car wash while I’m at it. (I’m just two full tanks short on my coupon card from a free wash ’n’ wax. But today, I somehow understand, there can be no waiting, no deferment, and no deals.) I overtip the jumpsuited Mexicans who spot-towel my vehicle (tender as nursemaids, even with the paint-scratched rear-quarter panel), knowing that the only thing separating them from me is a green card; that they have better records, on the whole, than I will ever have again.

  The rest of the way home is less than three miles. The car clean and fresh-smelling, the hood gleaming like a polished bowling ball. In the trunk, the fixings for breakfast and lunch and many more meals to come. A plan taking shape, or something like it. All I have to do now is stop myself from wondering if Sam will still be there when I arrive. If, sharp kid that he is, he might have reconsidered his situation overnight, changed his mind about his level of desperation. If I’ve already scared him away. If I’ll get home and find the bed he slept in untouched and untraceable. If this is just memory busting me again, or for once the real thing.

  SAM

  CROSSING THE LIVING ROOM in his boxers, eyes crusted with bad sleep, he watches the front door swing open and a familiar, broad-shouldered man carrying two brown bags of groceries enter the house.

  His father stops and stares: an apparition. “You’re still here.”

  At the last second a kind of rictus grin added for effect, to mask the statement as a question, and the question as a joke. But the eyes appear strained, and there’s nothing funny ab
out the situation, really.

  “I left you a note on the kitchen table.”

  “I saw it.”

  “We were a little low on food.”

  Sam nods. They stand staring at each other like strangers on opposite platforms of a commuter station.

  “Hungry?”

  He shrugs.

  “Well, I’m going to make some breakfast for both of us.” He moves toward the kitchen. “There are more groceries out in the car.”

  Sam walks to the bedroom and pulls on a pair of jeans. In daylight the room is almost unrecognizable, a holding pen with rubber matting and pairs of dumbbells on the floor. A place for desperate repetitions, not sleep. He pictures his father in a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and gym shorts too baggy for his age, doing curls and presses and squats by himself in the room every morning, sweating and grunting, pushing his thinning muscles till they can’t lift a single pound more. A routine he himself often performed in the weight room of his dorm in Storrs, late into the night if he was feeling low, rep after rep, to the point where Jake sometimes wondered aloud what his problem was. Why so intense? Good question. Turns out he, too, knows how to punish himself without restraint, holding nothing back, half in love with the black curtain of manufactured pain.

  Shirtless, he goes out of the house.

  A few feet of grass; a couple of cement squares; his father’s car, the ragtop that’s seen better days but which, this morning, is reflective as if waxed by elves, filling the little rectangle of cement that constitutes a driveway. The trunk open, holding enough supplies for a visit that might never end. As if costly abundance alone can cover all blown bets, make everything square.

  Picking up a brown bag and a twelve-pack of Diet Dr Pepper, he turns to go back inside, but freezes at the sight of an elderly Hispanic woman watching him from a window of the small beige house across the street, her hands pinning together the loose flaps of her peach-colored nightdress. She stands appraising his naked, bruised torso with a faraway half smile that doesn’t seem to include him at all—as if he’s marble and she’s looking inward, toward some vision that’s hers alone. He nods and smiles, but she turns away abruptly, and he’s left greeting the empty street like an idiot.

  In the kitchen, he sets the groceries down on the counter. There are glasses of orange juice laid out on the little table, a plate of toast, and the air smells fat with melted butter. His father at the stove, cracking eggs one-handed into a skillet that’s already smoking.

  “Still like your eggs sunny-side up?”

  The smile cautious. Because there aren’t any innocent questions anymore, haven’t been for a very long time.

  It’s the word still that bothers him most. The word held over from the past as if from an archaeological dig. Unearth it if you want, dust it off and put it out for inspection, maybe even casually throw it into use again as in historical times when the word was once used. But that doesn’t mean its value or meaning has survived. The value and meaning of the word will always reside with the original people in the original life. A boy and his dad. Folks as good as extinct now, or at best reduced to cheap replicas of themselves in foreign lands.

  “I’m not hungry.” He walks out.

  RUTH

  SHE DOESN’T SEE IT COMING, but Saturday opens into one of those days that seem to contain all the beauty and horror of living in the country. She wakes to an iconic New England spring, the ground well thawed, the flower beds smelling fertilely of mulch and compost, the daffodils that she planted along the front porch pushing up strong and bright.

  She begins the morning with back-to-back piano lessons in her living room, the students both fourth graders—Carrie Lockhart, whose sight-reading is precocious but her fingering slow, and Adam Markowitz, whose skills run the other way—and then the time is her own and she loads a chair that needs recaning into the Subaru and drives it over to Great Barrington; then back through Canaan to the oblong, church-fronted green of Wyndham Falls, historic site of the American Revolution, bedecked today with balloons and checkered-cloth tables displaying many varieties of baked goods, wax-sealed jars of preserves and duck-liver paté and pickled vegetables, as well as stalls of arts-and-crafty-type things, kilned pots and beaded Indian belts and knitted sweatercoats with wooden buttons big as your thumb. A town fair, in other words, populated with neighbors, fulltime and weekenders alike, from Goshen north to Ashley Falls.

  She is in possession of a single secret goal, which is one of the turkey pies made by Lucinda Jarvis, wife of Andy and mother of her student Ben, to whom she teaches piano with a certain amount of irritation (her sympathy for his tin ear more than offset by his persistent, shin-kicking rudeness) on Tuesdays and Thursdays at school. The Jarvis family less than huggable but their pies sublime. She will take one home and, at six o’clock this evening with a glass of white wine (not approved by her doctor), pull it steaming out of the oven and devour exactly half, savoring every mouthful of the crimped buttery crust; and tomorrow night, with a second glass of wine from the same bottle, she’ll eat the other half. And with that her weekend, recent chemo be damned, will be over.

  Thus the beauty portion of the day, neatly encapsulated: an independent woman, personal and medical challenges for the moment denied, buying a turkey pie at a country fair. The horror is the complicated part, as it usually is.

  She has the pie corralled and is waiting at the table for her change, Lucinda slowly counting out the bills while fishing in a roundabout way for Ruth’s confirmation of her son’s musical skills (“I heard Ben practicing the other day and he just sounded, I don’t know, Ruth, so mature for his age”), and Ruth murmuring her noncommittal assent (“He does seem to have a strong sense of himself at the piano”) when she feels a hand touch her shoulder. She turns and finds herself staring at Norris.

  Typically for a weekend, he’s colorfully dressed for golf, right down to the socks with little putters on them that she gave him for his forty-sixth birthday. He has less hair than just six weeks ago, she’d swear (but then, she reminds herself, so does she), and a few paces behind him stands a woman about her own age, not especially pretty, her face burdened with a look of anxious pedantry, as if in her life she’s witnessed more than she thinks it proper to discuss in polite society, leaving her permanently betwixt and between. Next to the woman is a young girl in thick horn-rimmed glasses, her expression mirroring to an alarming degree her mother’s.

  “Can I have a word, Ruth?” Norris asks in a low voice.

  Lucinda, suddenly all ears, places the bills in Ruth’s distracted, outstretched hand but doesn’t step away.

  “I’ve got a lesson starting soon,” Ruth lies, stuffing the loose money into her shoulder bag. “I need to be getting home.”

  “It’ll only take a minute.”

  He seems to need her to follow him and, caught in an ebbing tide of passivity, hefting the turkey pie in its clear plastic wrap, she allows herself to be led.

  Approaching the woman and her daughter, Norris stops and intones stiffly, “Ruth, I’d like you to meet Wanda Shoemaker and her daughter Celine.”

  There’s no further information, but Ruth instantly calculates that the woman must be the widow of Ralph Shoemaker from Salisbury, who died falling through thin ice on the Housatonic last winter. (She further recalls that it’s never been satisfactorily explained what the man was doing trying to walk across a frozen river in the middle of the night.) So, she thinks, Norris has found a widow to keep him company, and the widow has found him. Which is perfectly all right, though why the daughter should be named Celine when she clearly isn’t the least bit French is beyond her. Ruth doesn’t for a minute feel jealous, only shoved a level or two deeper into her isolation.

  She and the woman nod to each other—with the turkey pie bobbing between them like a docking buoy, shaking hands would be too hazardous—and then Norris walks on and she follows.

  It’s all rather awkwardly handled, but that’s Norris for you. He has an idea of things, bu
t the idea never quite jibes with reality, and whatever he does or says usually ends up falling somewhere in no-man’s-land, neither one thing nor the other, satisfying nobody. (Other than in the selling of insurance, for which he really does seem to have a knack.) They weave through clumps of people eating blueberry muffins and drinking cider and coffee out of paper cups and children playing tag, and recognitions are made, mostly silently, and various glances exchanged among the assembled adults, and Ruth sees it all and understands the range of implications and messages surrounding her and this man she once married but can no longer conceive of wanting.

  Under the huge sugar maple at the east end of the green, Norris stops again and turns to wait for her. The heavy-limbed shade is a kind of privacy and seems to afford him some much-needed confidence, which in turn seems to infuse him with a dose of courage, and after a few false casts with his long, skinny arms his hands settle on his hips in a badly borrowed cowboy pose that throws into inadvertent relief the pink golf shirt and those socks with the little putters on them. Standing before him now, she doesn’t come close to laughing at him. Wouldn’t do such a thing in the first place, mockery being in her eyes the favored artillery of losers and cowards; and in the second place, though she can see what might be comical about the scene, it will never be funny to her. That’s why she’s divorcing him. There isn’t a thing Norris can do or say that will ever be funny to her again, if it ever was, and for that she is truly sorry.

  The surprising weight of the pie is making her arms hurt. She decides to dive in and get the conversation over with, whatever it’s going to be.