Amherst (26 page)

Nothing to be done. She’s not going back now.

Her knock on the door is unanswered. She looks in at the window. A table strewn with books, some chairs, a kerosene lamp. No one home.

She tries the door, and it opens. Inside the cabin is suddenly warm, making her realize she’s grown cold. A black-iron wood-burning stove is alight, glowing red through its scorched window. She stands close to it, warming her hands, looking round.

Just the one room. A basic kitchen at one end, an open gas ring for cooking, a sink. A long table in the middle, with his books spread round the lamp. Shelves on the timber walls. More books. A bed at the far end, covered with a thick rug woven in orange and black. Through the windows nothing but trees.

No fridge. No TV. No electricity of any kind, as far as she can see. No bathroom. He must wash in the sink. There must be an outhouse of some sort, for a lavatory. Or does he squat in the woods?

The undignified image makes her laugh, breaking the solemnity of this first encounter. The cabin’s simplicity daunts her. Is it really possible to live this way?

She checks the books open on the table.
Don Quixote
, which he was reading when she first saw him in Rao’s Cafe, the bookmark now almost at the end. She hadn’t stopped to think back then, but there’s a clue here. Don Quixote is a fantasist, isn’t he? A romantic. One who invents his life to make it more significant than it actually is. Not that she’s ever read any more than the first chapters.

That’s what we do with love. Create a story to overlay the passing events of our lives so that a pattern emerges. What was random develops meaning.

Love as storytelling.

Austin Dickinson as Don Quixote, Mabel his Dulcinea, the peasant girl he has willed into playing the role of princess of his
dreams. So where do the windmills come in? All the great unfeeling world outside the dream, all of reality that denies the dream, there stand the giants against which he must forever set his lance.

So is Nick just another more recent incarnation? The fantasist who finds that real life disappoints him, and so retreats into a story?

On the table beside the book there’s a tin tobacco box, worn by much handling. Alice has never seen Nick smoking. A secret vice? She picks up the box and it rattles. She opens it. It’s full of small cream-colored oval pills. So Nick pops pills: another surprise. To get high? To get to sleep at night?

She tries calling his cell, but an automated voice tells her his number is unavailable. She goes outside and calls his name out loud, feeling foolish, scanning the surrounding trees. No one answers. She thinks of leaving a note, but decides against it.

So this is how it ends.

On the drive back she feels increasingly angry with him. It’s taken more courage than she’s admitted to herself to make this journey. Last night she slept badly, agitated by thoughts of seeing him again. And now—nothing. No resolution. He seems able to switch her on and off as he finds convenient, but she can’t switch off.

As she turns at last into the yard of the house on Triangle Street, she sees that Peggy’s car is gone. A man is standing by the back door, peering through the screen: a small bald man in leather jacket and jeans. When he turns, hearing Alice’s car pull up, she sees the handlebar mustache and recognizes Nick’s friend Luis Silva.

As she gets out of the car and locates her door key, he hurries to her side.

“I’m trying to raise Nick,” he says. “He’s not answering his phone.”

“He’s left,” says Alice. “He’s moved on.”

Silva looks startled.

“Is that what he said? Moved on?”

“He’s gone to his cabin in Vermont.”

“Oh.”

This information seems to trouble him. He doesn’t ask Alice what she’s doing here. It seems only polite to explain.

“He’s been letting me stay in the guest room. Peggy was here, but it looks like she’s out right now.”

“Did Nick see Peggy before he went?”

“No.”

It strikes Alice then for the first time that Nick left on the morning of Peggy’s return. Had he known when she would be coming home?

“Had you arranged to meet Nick?” she says.

“Not exactly arranged.”

But something’s clearly not right.

“You want to come in for a coffee?”

He checks his watch.

“Maybe for a moment.”

He follows Alice into the house. Peggy has left a note on the kitchen table.

How was the beast? Back late. Peggy
.

Silva reads the note, and makes the connections.

“The beast? You’ve been to see Nick?”

“Yes,” says Alice, putting on the coffee. “He wasn’t there.”

“He didn’t answer the door?”

“The door wasn’t locked. I went in. All his stuff was there, but no sign of him. I guess he was out walking in the woods.”

“Fuck,” he says. He sits himself down at the kitchen table and puts his chin in his hands. “He was your lover, I suppose.”

“I really don’t see—” But catching the expression on his face, she stops. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I hope I’m wrong.”

“About Nick?”

“He’s such a fucking fatalist. Sorry.”

“Don’t mind me. I know he’s a fucking fatalist. What is it you’re afraid of?”

“I’m afraid he’ll play his Get Out of Jail Free card.”

Alice brings the coffee to the table, with a carton of reduced-fat milk from the fridge.

“Black? White? Sugar?”

“Just black. Thank you so much.”

“What does that mean?”

Silva sips at his coffee. The rising steam from the mug glistens on his mustache.

“Nick’s a lovely man,” he says, “and a much-loved man. But he’s also a fucking idiot. He doesn’t believe in his own right to happiness. Perhaps there’s no such right. Whatever. Nick has to take it one step further. He believes in the inevitability of loss.”

“Loss of what?”

“Loss of hope. Loss of love. Loss of meaning. Nick believes we start out with a surplus of vital energy, which is youth, and it’s this energy that gives us the illusion of hope and meaning. Then the energy runs out, and the illusion fades. At some point we
discover there is no hope or meaning. Life continues, but without joy. And so the time comes, according to Nick, when the wise man chooses to call it a day.”

Alice feels herself go cold.

“You mean, commit suicide?”

“Get out of jail free.”

“Seriously?”

“Sure. He told me many times that he was only able to bear the indignities of life because he had his exit route all prepared.”

Die again. Then you’ll be free
.

“How?”

“He has pills. He’s collected them over the years. He’s shown me.”

“In an old tobacco tin?”

“Yes.”

Alice’s heart is now pounding. Fragments of the last few days come bursting to the surface of her mind, bearing frightening new meanings.

When we become bored, we begin to die.

I’m not going anywhere.

I wanted to see if I could make someone happy.

“I saw his pills,” she says to Silva. “They’re on the table in his cabin.”

“Did it look like he’d taken some?”

“I don’t think so. Anyway, he wasn’t there.”

“He’d have gone off into the woods. There’s a spot he loves there, he told me. The top of some hill, with a big view.”

Alice shudders.

“Do you really think he’d do it?”

“Yes, I do.”

“How can we stop him?”

“Stop him?” says Silva sharply. “Why? I have no right to stop him. Nor do you. Life is not a duty.”

“Isn’t it?” says Alice, feeling stupid.

“If he’s made the decision, there’ll be letters in the mail. He promised me. I’ll get a letter.”

But will I? thinks Alice.

Silva rises.

“There’s nothing to be done,” he says. “We each have our own lives to live.” His eyes fall on Peggy’s note on the table. “Nick is not the beast. He’s an honest man. There are few enough left. If he really has played his last card, I shall miss him.”

So he goes. Alice is left in turmoil. Her first instinct is to get back into the car and drive back to the cabin. But what if she’s too late? Does she want to be the one to find him? That’s Peggy’s right, surely. Or Peggy’s duty.

Life is not a duty.

Is that true? Does Nick owe it to her, or to anyone, to go on living?

She searches for a phone number for Peggy but finds nothing. And even if she were to find it, what would she say? It may all be a fuss over nothing.

Except it is exactly that: a fuss over nothing. Kill yourself and you put yourself on the side of the nothing. She feels the anger rising. Of course Nick has a duty to live. We all have a duty to live. We’re something, not nothing. He’s physically fit and healthy; he’s part of the human race. He’s not in jail. Death is not freedom, it’s annihilation.

She wants to tell him so, to his face. Call him a coward. Call him a deserter. And if he still insists on his right to surrender this most precious gift, then . . . then . . .

He can write me a fucking letter too.

Suddenly she knows she’s going to go back. The morning’s long over. Her return journey will be in darkness, which she hates. But it can’t be helped.

She plays the radio as she drives, searching through gospel preachers and country music until she finds a station that plays oldies. She fills the car with the sounds of the Andrews Sisters and the Beatles, as she retraces the road to Vermont.

We’re in a chain, Nick. We all help each other. We pass it on. If you give up, it makes it harder for the rest of us.

Now that she knows the route, it seems to pass faster. She’s on the road that climbs between trees long before she expects it. Then she’s rounding a bend and there it is, the cabin with the smoking chimney. The red Dodge truck.

He can’t still be wandering the woods. It’ll be dark soon. He must be in the cabin. Alive or dead?

It seems ridiculous to ask so melodramatic a question, but she saw the pills with her own eyes. His Get Out of Jail Free card. If he has the pills out, he must be thinking of taking them. Maybe he has taken them. What does she do then?

She tries to think clearly. Have a plan. Be prepared.

Drive to the nearest town, find someone to report to, the police presumably. There’ll be an investigation. It could mean she misses her flight home.

Getting out of the car, she feels scared. Not of Nick’s suicide, but of the dead body. She’s never seen anyone dead before.

She goes first to the cabin window, and looks in. And there he is, sitting at the table, large as life. He looks up and sees her. He frowns. He’s up, and the cabin door opens.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

At once the terrors melt away, and she feels foolish.

He’s wearing a padded jacket and hiking boots. A line of stubble darkens his jaw. His voice is hard, angry.

She says, “I wanted to see you.”

Her own voice is timid, appeasing, like a child.

“You’ve seen me. Now leave me alone.”

He goes back into the cabin, slamming the door hard behind him.

Now she’s angry again. After her fears for his life, after her long drive, she deserves better. She bangs on the cabin door. She opens the door and marches in. He’s bending over the wood-burning stove, taking logs from the stack by the chimney to feed the dull burn within. He straightens up and turns to her, his face flushed.

“Now what?”

“I’ve had a long drive,” she says. “The least you could do is offer me some coffee.”

“Coffee?” He seems surprised by the proposition. “Then you’ll go?”

“Yes.”

She sits herself down at the table. The old tobacco tin is still there, beside his book. He moves about the cabin, knocking into chairs. His body is saying, I want to barge you out of my way. I want to tread on you. He goes to the sink and runs water from the tap into an iron kettle. It sounds like pissing.

He makes the coffee with a filter cone and a jug. It strikes her that this is not the backwoods style. Somewhere he must have a stash of paper filters.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. You. Living here like Davy Crockett. Reading Cervantes.”

“There’s no milk,” he says. “You want milk, you get back in the car and drive to Topsham.”

“Black is good.”

He brings the mugs of coffee over to the table. Lights the lamp with a cigarette lighter he pulls out of one pocket. She drinks the hot, bitter liquid and is strengthened. She thinks, I won’t be bullied. Let him be the first to speak.

He drinks his coffee in silence. Then—

“I suppose Peggy told you.”

“Yes.”

“She should have known better.”

“She told me not to come.”

“So why did you come?”

“Unfinished business.”

With each moment that passes she’s losing her initial embarrassment. She can see it now, in the way he won’t look at her, in the restlessness of his hands. He’s not angry, he’s frightened.

“Nothing ever gets finished,” he says.

“Do you have some kind of lavatory here?”

“Outside.”

She goes out into the twilight. There’s a small privy behind the cabin, with a wooden seat over a bucket. Beside the seat is an orange tub full of sawdust. No toilet paper.

“I can’t use that,” she says, returning. “There’s no paper.”

“It’s in a box. To stop the mice shredding it.”

“I thought maybe you used the sawdust.”

“No. The sawdust goes into the bucket when you’re done. When the bucket’s full, you put it outside for a few months, and it turns into manure. There’s only me here. It takes a while to fill up.”

“So now I know.”

She sits down at the table facing him. They look at each other properly for the first time, and neither of them speaks. She picks up the tobacco tin.

“Your Get Out of Jail Free card.”

“Who told you that?”

“Your friend with the mustache.”

He takes the tin from her and opens the lid. It’s full of pills.

“See? Untouched.”

“But you have the tin out.”

“I like to keep it where I can see it.”

“Might you use it?”

“I might. Not that it’s any of your business.”