“You’re sweet,” she said.
“I’m counting my blessings,” he answered cryptically, not sure himself exactly what he meant.
At the cabin door, Jenny rummaged through her purse, found a key, and struggled with the lock for several seconds before the mechanism finally relented with a dull click. T reached around her, turned the knob, and pushed open the door.
“Shit.” She flipped a light switch several times with no effect. “Too much to hope for,” she said. She looked back to T. “You bummed?”
“About what? No electricity?” He moved past her into the living room and tossed her backpack onto the cushions of a rustic wood-frame couch, sending up a small mushroom cloud of dust.
“Jesus Christ,” Jenny said, closing the door. “The place is filthy. And it’s cold.”
“It’s not bad,” he said. “Why don’t you see if there’s blankets and bedding?” He went into the kitchen and tried the sink. “We’ve got running water,” he called as Jenny disappeared down the hallway.
“Plenty of bedding,” her voice came back to him. Then she appeared in the kitchen doorway holding an armful of blankets and sheets. “Will you stay?”
“Sure. Why not?” He turned the kitchen faucet on and off. “No hot water, though.”
“Damn. I was looking forward to—” She looked at the counter. “Is that from mice?” she asked.
“Afraid so.”
“God,” she said. “I hate mice. I know it’s girly, but—You don’t think there’s rats?”
“Just field mice, I’m sure,” T said. “They get in during winter.”
Jenny looked suddenly and deeply unhappy.
“Go make the beds,” T said. “I’ll clean up in here.” He knelt and opened the cabinets under the sink. “Look at this.” He pulled out a blue plastic pail overflowing with cleaning supplies. “We’re in business.”
Jenny watched him quietly as he went about dampening a rag and wiping off the counters. She stood in the doorway piled down with bedding. “You don’t have to do that,” she said.
He pushed the mouse droppings off the countertop and into the trash pail he had found under the sink. “I don’t mind,” he said, and then stopped when he realized she was standing with her arms full of bedding observing him as if amazed by his behavior and slightly wary, as if she were watching a large foreign animal in the kitchen and wasn’t at all sure it might not turn on her. He tried to reassure her. “I wasn’t going anyplace,” he said. “I’m having fun here.” He pointed toward the bedrooms. “Go. Go make the beds.”
While she was busy in the bedrooms, T finished wiping down the counters and then dusted the furniture. He took the couch and chair cushions outside to bang them into each other and slap them with the handle of a broom he had found in the
otherwise empty kitchen pantry, and then he went about sweeping the dusty floors. He liked cleaning. Something about the mindless, repetitive swirl of activity calmed him. Mornings, while the coffee brewed, he liked to wash the few plates and cups from the prior evening’s snacking. He liked the feel of warm water running over his hands while he turned a ceramic cup or plate, going over it with a soft, soapy sponge. He enjoyed doing things with an empty head, and cleaning was the right activity for that, requiring just enough attention to pass the time outside himself. And then, when he was done, there were results. Things were clean, and neat, and in order.
In Salem, his house was immaculate. Day after day living there he had cleaned and recleaned and cleaned again. More than once he had found himself standing at the kitchen table with a dish rag in hand while he stared out the window at nothing but sky and the bulk of his thickly treed mountain, the one that rose up in the near distance and hovered endlessly unmoving over his house. His time in Salem had required him to tap a lifetime of resources. He philosophized. He told himself to live in the moment, to accept whatever it gave, to immerse himself in the experience. He tried to see things truly. He argued to himself that seeing things clearly and truly and acknowledging his situation would be the first step before he could figure out what to do next and how to move on. He was sure he would eventually move on, that his life would start up again, that it was only a matter of time. He read novels, classic and modern. He read poetry, mostly modern and contemporary.
He listened to jazz almost constantly. He exercised. He was not the kind of man who was meant to live alone. Isolation was an agony to be endured, and he did pull-ups and push-ups and leg lifts. He bought a free standing gym and used it daily. He power-walked at least two miles every day, often several times that. He drank one to two glasses of wine a day, traveling north to Roanoke or south to Blacksburg to buy the best vintages. He played computer games: Myst and Doom and a dozen others, chess on the Internet, all the sports games on PlayStation 2. More than once he’d found himself at two or three in the morning working the controls of a computer game when his engagement in the virtual action suddenly ceased of its own accord and he saw himself, a man in his fifties up in the middle of the night, alone, totally engaged in an utterly meaningless virtual world, and each time it happened, he felt ashamed. And he felt something very close to shock. How did he get to such a place? How did it happen? He cleaned; he listened to jazz; he played computer games; he exercised; he collected and consumed wine; in time he got into photography, buying equipment, taking pictures, trying to learn PhotoShop; and one by one the months passed until there was more than a year’s worth of them and if anything essential had changed he didn’t know what. He was pushing his way through time like a swimmer working to cross a huge body of water.
“We can make a fire,” Jenny said. She came out of one of the bedrooms with a white quilt wrapped around her shoulders like a cape. “There’s a great fireplace in the bedroom.”
“Did you check the flue?” T asked.
“That’s better,” she said, noticing the countertops in the kitchen. She went to the window, which looked out over the river. “I love the views here.”
“It’s a great cabin.” T joined her in the kitchen. “What’s your uncle do?”
“CPA,” she said. “But we don’t want to talk about Uncle Chuck.” She leaned against the window and watched him a moment. “You’re handsome,” she said. “You look good in moonlight.”
“Think so? Moonlight hide my age?”
“You’re old,” she pronounced, as if she had been considering the subject, “but you’re sexy too. You’re one of those sexy older guys it’s easy to get off on, like Richard Gere, kind of; or, no, Sean Connery. Who wouldn’t want to get down with Sean Connery? You’re kind of like that,” she said. “I bet you know it, too.”
“You’re flattering me.”
“I’m not,” she said. She looked down at her legs as if remembering something and then rubbed them briskly with the palms of her hands. “I’ve got to get out of these things,” she said. “Ever worn leather several days straight?” When T didn’t answer, she added, “I didn’t think so. How about this for a plan? You make a fire. Meanwhile, I get out of these pants and take a quick, cold shower. Then, when I’m done, I can warm up with you in front of the flames.”
“Did you check the flue?” T asked again.
She shook her head. “Think it’s a problem?”
“I’ve got a flashlight in the Rover,” he said. “You go ahead. It’ll probably be fine.”
She wrapped her arms around him and planted a loud kiss on his cheek. “There’s wood in the thingamajig by the fireplace.” She grabbed her backpack from the couch, clutched it to her chest, and disappeared into the back of the cabin.
Outside, there was a definite chill in the air. It felt like a storm might be coming on. T hugged himself and put the hood up on his jacket. He hurried through the shadows to the Rover, where he found Lester in exactly the same position, with his nose in the seam between the seat cushion and back-rest. When he saw the bucket of fried chicken on the floor, he realized he was hungry. He opened the container and was amused to find half the chicken gone. He wouldn’t have thought she could eat that much, and he wondered if perhaps Lester had pulled himself up out of sleep long enough to eat a fried-chicken dinner. He imagined them both munching on cold fried chicken, wondering where the old guy had gone off to, and then Lester going back to sleep while Jenny went out to look around. Or she might just be a small girl with a big appetite. He grabbed a chicken leg from the bucket, took the Mag light from the glove compartment, and went around to the back of the Rover for his suitcase. After he finished off the drumstick and before he closed the hatchback, he remembered the emergency supplies stored near the spare tire and retrieved a blanket-sized fleece tightly rolled and packed into a clear
plastic container. He pushed the guitar case aside and crawled to the back seat, where he spread the fleece over Lester.
After lugging his oversized suitcase up the hill and laying it on the bed, he checked the flue, shining the flashlight beam up the chimney shaft. Not seeing anything worrisome— blockages of leaves, bird nests, thick incrustations of creosote— he piled three logs on top of several small pieces of kindling and pulled down a round container of matches from the mantel. To get the fire started, he retrieved the current
New Yorker
from his suitcase, tore out a dozen glossy pages, crumpling them into crushed balls of print, and wedged them under the soot-charred andirons. A few minutes later the fire was crackling, the first flames taking hold in the kindling as smoke pooled worrisomely for a moment before being drawn up the flue.
From the bathroom came the sound of a running shower. Water splashed so loud and distinct against porcelain, he could almost see the blocked flow, the fat, twisting stream in the center where minerals had caked the small, concentric circles of tiny holes. He guessed the bathroom door wasn’t completely closed, and when he went quietly out into the hall, his guess was confirmed. The door was ajar the width of a man’s fist. The red light of the fire, now crackling and snapping, lit up the hallway where he stood. He backed out of the light into a second, smaller bedroom and saw, in the dark, that the bed had not been made, though a fat comforter and what looked like a pillow and sheets were stacked neatly at the foot of the matrress.
He went out into the hallway again and slid along the wall into a tongue of shadow, where he saw Jenny’s reflection in a sliver of mirror. She was undressed with her back turned to him, in the process of pulling her hair behind her head and fastening it somehow. She looked to be tying it back, as if with a ribbon or a rubber band. Her arms were raised and he could see the sides of her breasts, full and weighty in muted moonlight coming from a window behind the drawn shower curtain. Half of her back was draped in shadow so that the undulating course of her spine seemed to divide her between light and dark. She had no tattoos. He thought every young woman these days was tattooed. As far as he could see, she had no moles or scars to mar the lines of her body. When she dropped her arms, having finished tying back her hair, he moved away quietly, fearing she might turn and see his reflection in the mirror watching her.
He took off his jacket and lay down in front of the fire on the bearskin rug, looking absently a moment at the mounted head in profile: the dog-like ears, the snout and white teeth that looked sharp enough still to be dangerous. He ran his fingers though the fur and asked himself what he would do if, as appeared to be a distinct possibility, Jenny was planning to sleep with him. He hadn’t had sex in more than two years. His entire sex life these past two years had consisted of occasional, boredom-induced masturbation. He seemed to have lost the ability to successfully fantasize. In his youth, his fantasies were wild. He dreamed of sex with multiple women, a woman on his back with him atop a woman on her back; sex
with couples; sex with dozens; massive orgies. Fantasy after fantasy brought him to crackling orgasm. In his youth. When he woke up every morning of his life with a raging erection. Which had stopped exactly when? At forty? Forty-five? Now he woke with only the need to pee. Now his old fantasies all struck him as ridiculous and shallow. Whereas in his youth the women all moaned with pleasure as he pounded himself to orgasm, now they tended to evaporate within minutes of their conjuring, leaving him holding his halfhearted member in hand as he drifted off to sleep. Now, after seeing Jenny naked in the shower—a beautiful young woman who was apparently interested in him—he found himself more worried about actually having sex with her than looking forward to it.
He conjured again the image of Jenny in moonlight tying up her hair, but the picture faded after a moment or two, and then he was thinking about the cover of a slim book of contemporary poetry he had purchased recently. It was a reproduction of Thomas Hart Benton’s
Persephone
. Snuggled in the hollows of a gnarled oak tree, unclothed Persephone’s perfect body radiates the splendid luxury of youth, while behind her an old man with thin gray hair and features twisted into ugliness by age reaches one arthritic hand toward her thigh. T pushed the image out of mind. He wasn’t old and arthritic. He hadn’t crept away from his horse-drawn cart to spy on innocent Persephone. He had picked up Jenny and her companion hitchhiking. He had delivered them where they wanted to go. At Jenny’s request, at her urging, he had agreed to spend the night in her uncle’s cabin. As for the old man’s lust in the
Benton painting, about that he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure what he was doing. He didn’t know what he wanted. All he knew for absolute certain was that he preferred being where he was, in front of a fire in a cabin on the Thousand Islands waiting for Jenny to take her shower, to where he had previously been headed, which would most likely have been a generic, sanitized motel room separated by four walls from everyone else in the world.
The sound of the shower curtain being pulled aside in the bathroom bounced out into the empty hallway, followed in a moment by Jenny’s inarticulate squeals and articulate curses—
Oh, shit; motherfucker; son of a bitch
—and the interrupted rhythms of water splashing off a body and onto porcelain. Then the water stopped, the curtain was pulled back, and the sound of scurrying feet preceded her appearance in the bedroom doorway wrapped in a blue towel held together by one fist at her breasts, but not long enough to cover her. She stood a moment shivering in the doorway. After the first instant’s reflexive dropping of his eyes, T fixed his gaze on her face.