He had met Alicia a little more than a year after Brooke left him. He had an apartment downtown, just outside the old meat-packing district, with a view of the Hudson, and with the help of some friends he knew through Brooke, he had invested enough money in an Off-Broadway play to earn a producer listing, which in turn earned him the right to quietly observe rehearsals. He was still in his early thirties then, and hardly wealthy, but his various businesses were doing well, and to Alicia, he realized, he must have appeared to be rich. She was twenty-two, a little more than a year out of SUNY Purchase, with a BFA, an eight-month-old son, and no child support from the father, who was still in college. She lived with her parents in Massapequa, Long Island, and commuted into the city to work days in a coffee shop and nights on the play while leaving her son, Evan, to be raised by his grandparents. She was a tall woman, taller than T when she wore her hair up, and she had a dancer’s body, muscular and lithe. It wasn’t lost on T that physically she was Brooke’s opposite. The contrast with Brooke was striking in every way. Where Brooke was flighty and unstable, Alicia was focused and resolute. Where Brooke never seemed to know what she wanted or even why she should want anything, which T attributed to her coming from a wealthy family and inheriting wealth, Alicia was superb at
focusing on a goal and doing whatever needed to be done to achieve it. When T met her, she was working eight-hour shifts at the coffee shop, grabbing a quick bite to eat and then taking the subway downtown, where she would rehearse all night, sometimes into the early hours of the morning, before catching a ride home with the director, who also lived out on the island. Once T got to know her a little, he started giving her rides home, and they quickly discovered the similarity of their circumstances. T was still principally living in Huntington, Long Island, and raising his six-year-old daughter, Maura, alone, with the help of his mother, who was only too glad to get involved since her husband, T’s father, had died suddenly a few years earlier. By opening night, T and Alicia were spending a couple of evenings a week together alone in his apartment, and most weekends together with the kids, eight-month-old Evan and six-year old Maura. By the time the play closed six months later, a qualified Off-Broadway success, they were married.
And thus. That was the way his life flowed.
Alicia, Evan, Maura, and T. For many, many years.
Maura grew up and married and moved away.
Evan grew up and went off to college.
T worked hard. T made money. T grew more and more isolated in his work. He worked, and he worked, and he worked more. The money grew and grew.
Alicia grew up too, and somewhere along the line, without T noticing, stopped loving him. In time she fell in love with someone else. Another actor. Several years younger. They
must have fallen deeply in love. T had no clue. Not until long after his exile to Salem. Not until the papers were all signed and the documents certified and Alicia owned most of what they had previously both owned. Then he found out.
Looking out the window at the Saint Lawrence, T’s thoughts skittered away from the day Alicia had driven down to Virginia to explain to him, furious and through tears, why he was responsible for all that had transpired, and then lingered on the early years, when her son, Evan, loved him as a father and his daughter, Maura, loved Alicia, if not completely as a mother, since Brooke was still in the picture, then at least as someone terribly important to her, someone she trusted and depended upon. He recalled those many years when the kids were still kids. He remembered the vacations they had taken together, to Greece and Italy, to the Scandinavian countries; he thought of the fjords and the Alps and the Mediterranean. He remembered, in particular, a summery night on Sea Island, off the coast of Georgia, during an August two-week family vacation, walking along the beach at night barefoot and hand in hand with Alicia while Evan ran in and out of the waves and Maura stuck close to Evan, looking after him; and for some reason he remembered the bicycles. Bicycling along the beach was one of the principal vacation activities there, and a bicycle or a group of bicycles would appear regularly in the moonlight, preceded by the sticky sound of tires spinning up sand. It was not a walk during which anything dramatic happened. It was not the night the four of them came across an alligator in the surf and called the Forest Service, and then watched as the creature was captured
and hauled away in the back of an SUV. It was an uneventful night: just the four of them on a moonlight walk along a white-sand beach with bicyclists. He held Alicia’s hand. Both the children called him “Daddy.” Evan running back to him with a shell or some sea dreck saying, “Daddy? What’s this?” Maura complaining, “Daddy. Evan’s going in up to his knees!” How small they were then. How different the world.
Behind him, Jenny made a soft, whimpering sound. She was wrapped up in a little ball, so near to the dead fire she was in danger of going up in flames should the quilt get pushed any closer to the embers. He picked her up easily, a hand under her shoulder and the other under her knees, placed her down gently on the bed, and then covered her with two thick green blankets, which he found on a shelf in the room’s only closet. From the wood carrier he took the last two split logs and placed them over the embers on the andiron. He used more of his
New Yorker
to get the fire going, then backed away from the hearth toward the middle of the room and took a second to look over the scene: Jenny asleep in a sleigh bed under a pile of blankets in the flickering firelight; the constant hum of the wind around the house and through the trees and over the water; the regular loud gusts of wind beginning as a soft moan and building to screams; the little cloud of smoke, thinner now but still there, hovering near the ceiling; the smell of wood smoke; the chill of cold air against his bare arms; the shadows; the moonlight through the window.
He considered leaving. It seemed like a good moment to simply walk out of this story. Jenny and Lester go on with
their lives. T goes on with his. Instead, he went to the kitchen for a drink of water, the fireplace heat and smoke having parched his throat, and found Lester sitting on the counter by the kitchen window huddled up inside one of the same deep-green blankets he had just put over Jenny. His back was against the wall, his knees were pulled to his chest, and he looked out the window and down to the water as if he hadn’t heard T walk into the kitchen, or the small gasp T made when he first saw the figure of a man wrapped in a blanket sitting on a kitchen counter.
T said, “How long have you been here?”
Lester didn’t acknowledge his presence. He stared out the window to the river in silence.
T poured himself a glass of water from the kitchen sink and nearly choked on the first mouthful, which tasted thick with sulfur. He held the water glass under his nose and then jerked his head back from the unpalatable odor.
“So,” Lester said, looking at T for the first time, “how was it?”
“Water’s terrible,” he said. He put the glass down, leaned back against the sink facing Lester, and grasped the counter-top with the palms of his hands. “How was what?”
“Jenny,” Lester said. “Sleeping with Jenny. How was it?”
T met Lester’s eyes, which were narrow and glaring, and returned his hard gaze with one sleepy and comfortable.
Lester turned back to the window. “She doesn’t like it, you know.”
“Doesn’t like what?”
“Sex,” he said. “She doesn’t like sex.”
“She doesn’t? Ever? With anyone?”
“She’d rather get a tooth pulled. Why? Did she do the whole act for you? Did she have an earthshaking orgasm?” Lester looked as though he were crouched inside his blanket, as if, should he want to, he could leap from the counter. “She did, didn’t she?” he said, settling the matter. He touched his head back against the wall and looked up, in the direction of the moon. “Forget it,” he added. “It was an act. It hurts her, physically. Her vagina actually physically hurts when she has sex.”
“She told you that?” T said. “What? Always? It’s always hurt her to have sex?”
Lester said, “You think you know something about Jenny?” He shook his head, as if despairing of T’s ignorance.
“I don’t think I know anything about Jenny.” T took a step toward Lester and then stood there awkwardly in the middle of the kitchen.
“Fuck,” Lester said, as if too disgusted to continue the conversation. He covered his face with his hands. “I’m tired.”
T watched him a moment longer, then started aimlessly out of the kitchen toward the living room before noticing the guitar case propped up against the wall. He touched the hard plastic shell, running his fingers over one of the metal snaps. “Are you a musician?” he asked.
Lester shook his head.
“What’s in the guitar case?”
“Red guitar.” He took his hands away from his face. “It’s valuable.” He turned his back to the window and slid his legs off the counter. “I’ll sleep on the couch,” he said, and then paused a moment, thoughtfully. “I just wanted you to know about Jenny. I’m not bullshitting you. I lived with her for a year. I watched her go through all her stuff.”
“All what stuff?”
Lester pulled the blanket around him and hunched his shoulders as if he were cold. “Just— I know a little bit about her,” he said. “It hurts her to have sex. It’s one of the reasons we split up. I mean, she’d do it, for me, but I was like—” He slid down from the counter. “I just thought you should know.”
T said, “I didn’t have sex with Jenny.”
“Please.” Lester tugged at his blanket. “I got this out of your closet. I walked right past you.”
“I didn’t have sex with her,” T repeated, and went out into the hallway. He ignored the questioning look on Lester’s face. “I’ll sleep in the back bedroom,” he said. “There’s another bedroom across from the bathroom, if you don’t want to sleep on the couch.”
Lester picked up the guitar case. “I don’t mind couches. Spent half my life sleeping on couches.”
T looked past him out the kitchen window. The moon had moved out of sight, but he could still see its light reflecting on the river. “Well…” he said, and he started down the hallway. Behind him, he heard Lester take a few steps out of the kitchen, and when he turned around to close the bedroom
door, he saw him standing in the hallway, looking back at him, a long-haired young man draped in a green blanket, holding what he claimed was a red guitar.
He stood silently a while in the dark with his ear close to the door, and after the house was silent for several minutes, the only sounds the wind and an occasional loud pop from the burning logs, he undressed in the dark down to his underwear and undershirt, laid his clothes on top of the room’s single dresser, and climbed into bed under a weighty comforter and yet another of the plentiful green blankets. He lay on his back, bent the pillow in half to prop his head up higher, and folded his hands over his chest. He was tired, and he could tell it wouldn’t take him long to fall asleep. He let his thoughts slip back to Jenny fixing her hair in the moonlit bathroom, and then to Jenny again as she came through the bedroom door holding a towel around her, and then the moment when she let the towel drop before settling under the quilt with him. He tried to hold those moments in his mind’s eye for as long as he could, until he felt himself sinking toward sleep with the image of Jenny’s body floating over him, the flawless lines and curves of her torso and belly, the perfect weight of her breasts, and as he was imagining her, remaking her image out of memory and desire, the real Jenny pushed open the bedroom door trailing the white quilt over her shoulder and stood there panicky for a moment. “T?” she said. “T? Where are you?”
T sat up in bed, shaking off sleep, and before he could say a word Jenny hurried under the covers with him. She was sobbing. Her face was so wet with tears that his undershirt soaked
through as soon as she laid her head upon his chest. “Don’t leave me like that,” she whispered, and he felt her whole body shake with sobs and quiver like a child’s with quick, convulsive gasps.
He put an arm around her back. He smoothed her hair. “How long have you been crying?” he asked.
Between sobs, she answered, “I cry at night sometimes,” and then, “I wake up crying.” She pressed her body against his so hard and insistent it was as if she were trying to crawl inside him.
“It’s okay,” he said. He held the back of her head in the palm of his hand. “It’s okay,” he repeated, and he felt her body loosen slightly in his arms while her sobs diminished, slowly changing to deep and rhythmic breathing as she bit by bit relaxed in his arms.
Tawoke to the low rumble of thunder and the patter of rain against the bedroom window. He opened his eyes to morning light that seeped into the room through dusty, rose-colored blinds, giving the floorboards and single dresser and narrow bed a somber, rose-tinged aura. Alongside him, Jenny slept peacefully on her side, facing the closed bedroom door with the comforter pulled up to her neck so that all T could see of her was a bright blond profusion of hair spilling over the pillow and the shape of her body curled in an S under the quilt. He folded his pillow to prop up his head, lay on his back with his hands clasped over his chest, and watched the play of light on the ceiling for a minute before he decided to drive into town for supplies and then come back and make breakfast.
He carried his clothes into the master bedroom, where he sat on the still warm rugs in front of the dead fire and dressed. The cabin was quieter even than his home in Virginia, which he had thought, after living a lifetime in New York, was the quietest place on earth. Here, though, the only sound was the rain. If there were boats on the Saint Lawrence, they were either moving silently or they were too far away to hear. No cars. No airplanes. No people. Not even the hum of a refrigerator or the drone of a heating system. Not even, this morning, any wind. Only the soft tapping of a light rain as he pulled on his shoes and slipped into his jacket before creeping down the hall to the living room, where he had expected to find Lester asleep on the couch. Instead of Lester, he saw his photography equipment—a pair of tripods, two leather camera bags, and another equipment bag—in the center of the room atop a crumpled green blanket, as if Lester, after removing the equipment from the Rover, had taken care not to damage anything by laying it directly on the floor.