Authors: Mad Dash
“Look, I’ve got goose bumps,” she said, showing him a bare thigh under her short skirt. “It’s freezing! Oh, but let’s not go in.” Of course he gave her his sweater, a cardigan he ripped off like Walter Raleigh’s cape and put over her lap. No, now
he’d
be cold, they must share, she insisted. So they squeezed together on the same step and put opposite arms through the sleeves of his sweater, stretching it tight across their fronts. She was flirting, yes, but also, she really didn’t want him to be cold. His first experience of the way she could comfort and excite, be his friend and his lover at the same time.
Then Hood came.
Andrew had seen men who looked like Hood around the campus, the city, but had never met or spoken to one in person—no common ground on which to strike an acquaintance, obviously. His head was clean-shaven and shiny-bright, as if he polished it, and he had more piercings in one ear than Andrew had orifices in his whole body. He had black-painted fingernails and a wristband covered with spikes, a cigarette, or maybe a joint, dangling from his lips. He stuck one scrawny leg out the window and straddled the ledge. Holey jeans, a tank shirt, and steel-toed boots completed the outfit—and still he didn’t look tough. He had sleepy eyes, a benign, crooked-toothed smile, and when he spoke—“Hey, honey, it’s two minutes to midnight!”—he sounded more like the boy next door than a storm trooper.
For a moment—how long? a second, two seconds, yet uncommonly momentous to Andrew—Dash didn’t move. She sat still, the left side of her body warming the right side of his, while he wondered what she would do. A tiny sigh—and then the awkward untangling, the clang of cold metal when they stood up, the clambering back through the window. Someone turned off the music. Andrew got shuffled aside as people gathered around a TV set in the living room to see what was happening in Times Square. They slung their arms around one another and swayed, counting down “Ten! Nine! Eight!” Trapped in the drunken crush, he saw shiny-headed Hood wrap his tattooed arms around Dash and give her a long, ardent kiss on the mouth. Her arms stuck out straight behind his head, her hands limp; when she closed her eyes, the blue makeup glittered with silver specks in the light from the television.
He told himself he should stay, learn the situation, intrude, pretend it didn’t matter—but as soon as he could, he fought a path through the hot crowd and got out the door.
In his own apartment, weirdly quiet except for the muffled racket overhead, he thought,
Lucky escape
, for a while, then
What did you expect?
He wasn’t used to losing women, who usually liked him, but he was used to not getting what he wanted. Or possibly (Dash’s theory, years later) what he was used to was being prepared not to get what he wanted—a defense mechanism, a way to save face. Either way, blighted expectations were no strangers to him, and his usual coping method was weary resignation.
What else? What did you expect?
He was trying and failing to console himself with that sort of shoulder-shrugging fatalism when a quick knock came at the door. Dash.
And Hood, a few steps behind, carefully cupping a lighter to his cigarette. Or joint.
“Hi,” Dash said.
“Hi,” Andrew said.
She had on a feathery, spangly half poncho for a coat, and long red gloves. And she had that look again, as if she knew him unnervingly well and were only waiting, with tender amusement, for him to catch up.
“I wanted to use the fire escape,” she said softly. So Hood couldn’t hear? Not that he was paying any attention. One knee gave out and he lurched sideways, had to start over with his cigarette. He was drunk, but Dash wasn’t.
“It’s so high up, though,” she said. “I got scared.”
“The stairs are much safer,” Andrew agreed.
“Yes. We were wondering. Do you like black-eyed peas?”
He just smiled. He wanted to see her in daylight. Was she beautiful? Already he didn’t care.
“I’m—we’re having a party tomorrow. I make this thing of my mother’s called hoppin’ John. It’s a southern tradition. For every black-eyed pea you eat on New Year’s Day, that’s how many dollars you’ll make that year. Actually it’s more of a superstition.”
“Do I look that hard up?” He meant that as a
joke
; he was so
stupid.
“I’d like to come,” he said quickly. “Where do you live?”
So it began, their confusing, undercover, thankfully short period of courtship. Hood proved to be a congenial rival, and before long Andrew and Dash were a couple. Happily ever after. She made hoppin’ John every New Year’s Day, and he pretended to like it. This was the first time in twenty-one years he hadn’t had gas all New Year’s night.
S
unday morning dragged on. Now that it was too late, he felt guilty for not going to church. It wasn’t that he had nothing to do; he just couldn’t stand the thought of doing it.
He wandered into the downstairs office he and Dash shared, then forgot what he’d come in for. It used to be a pantry off the kitchen. With no window, it was a dark, gloomy room, and so, about ten years ago, Dash squeezed up against the house behind the shrubbery and shot a wide-angle photograph of the backyard. She blew it up and hung it on the office wall inside a window-shaped frame she made, complete with curtains. It fooled people for a few seconds—they thought it was a real window. But only in summer; in wintertime, the sunny greens and pastels gave it away. They were depressing, too, unless you were in a hopeful frame of mind and the thought of springs past and to come cheered you up. Andrew wasn’t in a hopeful frame of mind.
He’d liked Dash’s faux period, though. She would take close-ups of light switches around the house, enlarge them to their exact dimensions, mount them on thick cardboard, and glue them on the walls in unexpected places. Same with the thermostat and the heat registers, the doorbell. People halted at the sight of them for a minute, then laughed. But after a while, she’d tired of her domestic reproductions and taken them all down. All but the window.
Nostalgia washed over him. He felt heavy, homesick. If he could find them, would it be even
more
depressing to hang up a few fake light switches now, or would it make him smile? He knew where they were, in a drawer in the oak file cabinet. She kept some of her early work there, pre-Chloe, back when she’d done all her own developing and printing in a tiny darkroom in the bathroom of her apartment.
She kept other photos in that file cabinet, too. They were in a brown envelope at the back of the bottom drawer, the made-up name “Municipal Boro Council” scrawled on top in her spiky printing—“in case Chloe ever looks in here.” He went to the cabinet and pulled out the envelope, carried it to the desk, turned on the lamp. They used to look at these pictures together, but not in a long while. He couldn’t remember the last time.
The good ones were in the middle, between batches of dull cityscapes and parking lot scenes for camouflage. They were in black and white—she’d have had to send color film to a lab. In the first few, they were kissing. “We never get to
see
ourselves when we kiss,” she’d said. “Don’t you want to see how we look?”
They looked like lovers. In this one she was perched on his lap, in the kitchen at his place, he in his boxer shorts, Dash in nothing. He’d felt self-conscious; she hadn’t. She looked like a sleek, smooth fish, her skin glowing pearl white. In another photo she had her tongue in his ear for a joke, but the joke was the expression on his face, mirth battling consternation. Even then, his dignity was not to be trifled with.
The next ones were in her apartment, in the old iron bed she’d found somewhere and painted red. Horrible bed; the springs squeaked, the mattress had a trough in the middle that forced them to sleep jammed against each other because of gravity as much as desire. The first pose was artily tasteful, Andrew on his back, Dash pressed against him with her bent knee covering his groin, her elbow coyly hiding the tip of her breast. They had their eyes closed, pretending to sleep, but their secret smiles gave them away.
They got bolder in the next shot: full frontal nudity flat on the bed, holding hands and grinning into the camera. Dash’s blinding smile took up her whole face, squeezing her eyes to slits. Her pale nipples, her innocent knees, the shadows of her rib cage, the triangle of hair between her legs…His chest felt clogged. He stood up and sat down again.
Their intimacy had been so thrilling to him, and at the same time so natural. Dash never felt any shame, but she was never immodest or coarse. Just free. And so kind to him. Before he knew her, he could never have thought of himself as the sort of man he looked like in these photographs, sleepy-eyed from sex, shaggy-haired, lax, his body stretching and languorous. A sensualist. She’d taught him to be who she wanted him to be, and that was what he’d been hoping for, one of the reasons he’d fallen in love with her—so she could make him feel truer to himself. Not such a stranger.
He picked up the phone and dialed her number at the cabin.
The machine came on. Disappointment made his mouth taste sour. He didn’t leave a message.
God, her apartment. He remembered that lamp on the bedside table: seashells filled the clear glass base, and the shade revolved when you switched on the bulb, illuminating a beach scene with rocking waves. She’d throw a gauzy scarf over the lamp when they made love, and they’d lie on their backs afterward, talking, talking, following the colored lights around the ceiling until they hypnotized themselves to sleep.
I don’t belong here
, he would think at times, staring at the crumbling plaster walls or smashing a roach in the bathroom or trying to endure the music on her cheap stereo. But the very things that made him recoil also drew him in, as if his neat, scrupulously planned life needed the relative squalor of Dash’s for balance. It wasn’t that he’d felt superior—merely out of place, a Young Republican at the Socialists’ convention. A small-town private whose first leave is in Paris.
The last photograph made him hiss in his breath. She’d destroyed all their “porn” shots eventually, the ones in which they were actually having sex, but she’d kept this one. At his request. It still aroused him, dirty-movie pose and all. There was nothing in it of him except his hairy legs and his testicles. Dash sat with her back to the camera, spine arched back like a wand, her streaky hair splashing her shoulders. Her heart-shaped bottom was so beautiful, so…beautiful. He grabbed the phone and called her again.
“I’m coming down,” he blurted into the machine. He took a long, deep breath. “Emmm…nice day, think I’ll take a drive down your way, see how things are. I’ve been meaning to.” It wasn’t a nice day at all. He paused. He had things to say, but they were too jumbled and raw; he needed to organize his thoughts first. “Are you out for a walk? How are you? Em, well, then, see you in a bit.” He waited a beat before hanging up, hoping that would make the farewell
click
sound more careless.
eight
N
othing looked familiar to him here in winter, the fields and trees bare and stark, dreary brown instead of vivid green and overgrown. They didn’t have a mailbox; he almost missed the turn, which was unmarked except for the corner of the rotting fence of the Speichers, their nearest neighbors, behind which a few cows grazed in summer. The ruts were deeper than the last time he’d driven up the long dirt lane, which would be treacherous in snow or ice. Why did Dash like it here so much? A place in the country was her dream, not his. Rock Creek Park had all the nature he needed, and then some.
But the sight of their red-roofed, clapboard-sided cabin emerging from the last thicket of laurel and pine gave him an undeniable stab of pleasure. And there was Dash’s little white car, so dearly familiar, a piece of home in this wintry no-man’s-land. He pulled in slowly, parked beside it gently.
The crunch of gravel under his tires made a racket, though—she must’ve heard, was probably looking out the window now to see who it was. He climbed out of his car with smooth movements, slammed the door athletically. He surveyed the murky tangle of trees surrounding the front of the cabin, featureless to him, beautiful to her, with an interested, approving expression, hands on his hips. Then he turned and walked up to the cabin with confident, unhurried strides.
Blue canvas covers draped the porch furniture, pushed to the side farthest from the weather. Nothing but dirt and dead stalks filled the dozen or so flowerpots she’d planted last year. She’d made a winter wreath for the door, he saw, tangled vines twisted in a circle and studded with dried flowers and purplish berries. It took up the whole top half of the door; he had to knock at belt height. He straightened his shoulders, made his face casual. She was going to like this. Spur of the moment. One of her complaints about him was that he wasn’t spontaneous enough—a completely bum wrap. This would show her.
He knocked again after a minute, louder. He put his face in the middle of the wreath and tried to look in through the window. A twig poked him in the eye, under his glasses; he jerked back, blinking, watery-eyed. He tried the doorknob. Locked. Odd; she loved to brag that she never locked the door.
Out in the yard, he looked up at the chimney but could see no smoke, only gray, unmoving sky above the red roofline. The flat stones they’d set two summers ago in a mossy, curving path to the back of the cabin were slippery even when it wasn’t raining; he almost fell before he got to the steps up to the deck. His footsteps rang out on the wooden stairs. He tramped to the glass sliding doors, also locked, and peered into the living room, making a visor with his hands to block the glare.
The empty room looked cold, as if the woodstove had gone out a long time ago. He could make out sections of the Sunday paper strewn over the floor and the coffee table. That was his job, driving into the little town of Dolley for the
Post
on Sunday mornings; he couldn’t help hoping she found it inconvenient, having to go get it herself. An empty plate and glass sat on the hearth beside the ratty old shawl her mother had made her. He could see her glasses on top of an open book. He put his hands on the cold glass and stared in until his breath fogged the view.
She was probably down at the pond. Her favorite place. She would sit on the pier and stare out at the water until she lost track of time. He’d have to go get her, tell her it was time for lunch, time to go home. She’d turn to him with a glazed, erased look, her eyes the color of the water.
But she wasn’t in her spot, or anywhere else along the meandering pond bank. He called out; his voice echoed back from the other side. He thought of the time, two summers ago, when she’d talked him into going for a swim, and afterward he’d fallen fast asleep, facedown on the dock. When he woke up, she was paddling innocently at the far end, and his whole backside was covered with seaweed. Not seaweed, the green stuff growing at the bottom of the pond, algae or whatever. He looked like a science-fiction-movie freak. He put his arms out and stalked around the bank toward her, making monster noises while she squealed in pretend fear. They ended up making love in the cold water.
He went around to the front again. Since her car was here, she must’ve gone for a walk. He made a megaphone with his hands and yelled, “Dash!” in three different directions. Why didn’t they have a key hidden outside someplace? They’d talked about it, never gotten around to doing it.
He turned in a frustrated circle, surveying blankness. Had she never gotten his message? He’d left it over two hours ago. She was always going on tramps in the woods, but he seldom accompanied her—he preferred sitting on the deck with a book, or better, sitting inside with a book—so he didn’t know her trail system, where to even start to look for her.
Calling the police would probably be overreacting. She’d think so, anyway. He could hear her: “Oh, Andrew, you
didn’t.
My God, you are so neurotic.” Half an hour, that’s how long he’d give her. At four o’clock, he was calling the cops, and he didn’t care if she mocked him.
He needed something to occupy his mind in the meantime, keep it off horrible scenarios. Dash’s foot caught in a hole or a bear trap, Dash abducted by mountain men. Dash dying or freezing to death because of a heart attack. Her health was excellent, but she could have a sudden stroke, an embolus, an aneurysm as easily as anyone else. They’d have to send dogs out to find her, and it was going to be pitch-dark in two hours. He had to do something.
He’d chop wood.
Her pile was running low. She complained about old Bender’s habit of including wood in his drop-offs that was too big for the woodstove. She could chop up the smaller pieces herself, but the logs were too much for her; she had to leave them on the ground where Bender dumped them. Here was a chance for Andrew to do something helpful and admirable. Knightly. Something she would be grateful to him for.
He found the ax in the woodshed and gripped the handle experimentally, trying to recall if he’d ever held one before. Perhaps in Boy Scouts. Shouldn’t there be a platform to put the log on, a base of some sort, so it was at a more convenient height? He’d never thrown his back out before, but if this wasn’t a golden opportunity for it, he didn’t know what was.
He took a few practice swings, wishing he’d brought gloves. He set a bulky log on end. It wobbled, but it was only about twelve inches across; if he put his foot on it to steady it—good-bye foot. He spread his legs, dug his heels into the ground for traction, like a baseball player. Lifting the ax high overhead, he brought it down with all his might.
Not bad. His whole body vibrated, but he’d driven the ax into the log a good three inches.
Now if he could only get it out. He jerked and yanked, he hoisted it, log and all, and tried to smash it against another log, against the ground, against the side of the woodshed. It never budged. He was sweating, swearing—
A man’s voice. Coming from the side of the house, and now a laugh. Dash’s laugh. He froze.
His wife and a man he’d never seen before strolled around the corner of the cabin. Dash was in the act of elbowing the man in the ribs, a bit of shtick she reverted to when the joke or pun she’d just made was especially lame or obvious. The man, a burly fellow in a plaid jacket and a hunting cap, chuckled in appreciation. They looked up and saw Andrew at the same time.
She faltered, almost stopped. She was too far away for him to read her face precisely; the widened eyes and the
O
her mouth made might mean gladness, might mean shock. Otherwise, she looked relaxed and fit, light-footed. She had on clothes he couldn’t remember seeing before. Her cheeks were bright as cherries. She had on earmuffs.
“Andrew!” she called, waving a mittened hand. She said something inaudible to her fair-haired, thick-necked companion, who had to be Bender’s son-in-law, and they came forward together. A small black dog bounded out of the woods and ran past them, skidding at Andrew’s feet, turning in circles, giddy with welcome. Sock, he presumed. The watchdog.
“Wow,” Dash said, stopping just shy of him, “what a surprise.” She looked healthy. She looked beautiful. She swung her arms in a restless, girlish way, as if—he hoped—she’d have embraced him if they’d been alone. “Did you call? I’ve been out walking. With Owen. Have you two met? No, of course not. Owen, this is Andrew—Owen Roby.”
They shook hands; Roby’s was thick and meaty, like a baseball glove.
“We’ve been tracking muskrats along the creek,” Dash went on; she chattered when she was nervous. “Owen’s so smart, he knows what all the tracks are, possum, raccoon, squirrel—he can tell the difference between a gray squirrel’s footprints and a red squirrel’s footprints. Can you imagine?”
“Truthfully, no.”
“Oh, and we saw a wild turkey. As close as that tree, and then it flew away. Very clumsily. When did you get here? Have you been waiting long?”
“No, no. A couple of minutes.”
“I wish I’d known you were coming. Why didn’t you go inside?”
“The door’s locked.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s stuck. Owen’s going to fix it, he has a plane. Oh, Andrew—are you chopping wood?”
“No. Yes.” He tried to swing the log by the ax behind his leg, but it hit his ankle. Without wincing, he said, “Well, just getting started.”
“Oh, gosh, you don’t have to do that. Owen’s been doing it for me.”
Two minutes he’d known Owen, and he was sick of him.
“Where’s your wedge?” Roby said, or something that sounded like that, and started looking around on the ground. Andrew wrinkled his eyebrows, as if trying to remember where he’d left his wedge. What was a wedge?
A heavy, rusting, metal thing, wedge-shaped. Roby found it in the woodshed. “Here it is.” He tossed it in the air a few times, catching it in his paw. Before he could toss it to
him
, Andrew dropped the log on the ground, ax and all. Excalibur in the stone.
The logo on Roby’s hunting cap said
WORMER’S ORGANIC FEEDS.
His fine, pale-yellow hair and the pink streaks on his windburned cheeks gave him a naked, unprotected look that didn’t match the rest of him, which was rugged and planted-looking, quietly self-assured. He didn’t look at Dash or Andrew, didn’t smirk, didn’t flex his halfback’s shoulder muscles—which only made it worse when he took hold of the ax in one hand and slammed the log off it with a single hard chop to the ground.
Andrew heard himself say, “I loosened it.” His cheeks burned.
Dash wore a gentle, amused, wistful smile he couldn’t look at.
Next Roby tapped the wedge into the white gash the ax had made. With the same gallingly unassuming efficiency, he slapped the flat end of the ax against the wedge, and the log’s two halves fell neatly away.
“Ah, yes. Much easier that way.” Andrew gave a good-natured laugh, as if nothing pleased him more than a lesson in manly wood chopping in front of his estranged wife.
Dash’s echoing laugh was the one she used when she was trying to save someone’s feelings. “Oh, let’s not chop any more wood now, guys. It’s getting cold; let’s go inside and get warm.”
Let’s? Guys?
Roby pulled off his cap, ran his wrist over his thinning hair, and tugged it back on. “I guess I’ll be heading on back now.”
“Okay,” Andrew said.
Dash had a lot more to say, though, about the sticking front door, the kitchen cabinets, the stacked washer-dryer unit Roby was going to buy with his contractor’s discount and install in the bathroom. “Although I’ll kind of miss the Laundromat,” she added in a jokey voice, and Roby grinned and said, “No, I told you, the Velvet Cafe’s even better.”
“But only at the counter.”
“Right, not a table.”
“And especially on Mondays.”
“Because all the good stuff happened on the weekend.”
They laughed together, fond and easy.
“Gossip,” Dash explained eventually, noticing Andrew’s look. “Town gossip, at the Laundromat or at the café—”
“I got it.”
Roby finally left, walked off down the hill. It didn’t occur to Andrew to ask where he was going until he was almost out of sight; he was too happy to see him go.
“He left his truck down at the Speichers’,” Dash said, moving toward the house. “He’s putting in their new hot-water heater.”
“I thought he was a farmer.”
“He’s everything, it’s amazing. He raises beef cattle, he does construction, he delivers mail over Christmas, he works for a logging company sometimes, sometimes for the county extension service. Plus he hunts and fishes and grows a big garden every summer…” She stopped talking to open the front door, which involved turning and pulling up on the knob while hip-butting the bottom panel and pushing in. “See? It wasn’t locked, I never lock it.”
The cold cabin smelled like ashes. Dash went around turning on lamps, picking up plates and carrying them into the kitchen. “I’ll make some tea,” she called to Andrew. “Do you think you could make a fire?”
Was she being sarcastic? He watched her punch the blinking light on the answering machine in the kitchen; she had her back to him, so he couldn’t see her face while his message played back. Did he sound desperate? No, he decided; just unusually alert.
“Shall I make one in here, too?” he asked when he’d finished building a fire in the woodstove. They had a potbellied stove in the kitchen, but seldom used it. Dash said no, that was fine, while she took cups down from the cabinet and got milk out of the refrigerator.