Bitter Sweet (44 page)
‘Remember when we were little and the old man would whip our asses when we did something wrong?’
‘Yup. Whip ‘em good.’
‘I’ve been wishing he was around to do it again.’
‘What have you done that you need whipping for?’
Eric drew a deep breath and said it plain. ‘I’m having an affair with Maggie Pearson.’
Mike’s hairline rose and his cars seemed to flatten. He took the news without comment at first, then mined the bill of his cap to the front and remarked, ‘Well, I see why you wish the old man were here, but I don’t think a licking would do much good.’
‘No, probably not. I just had to tell someone because I feel like such a lowlife.’
‘How long has it been going on?’
‘Last week, that’s all.’
‘And it’s over?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh-oh.’
‘Yeah. Oh-oh.’
They mulled awhile before Mike asked, ‘So you intend m see her again?’
‘I don’t know. We agreed to stay away from each other for a while. Cool offa little and see.’
‘Does
Nancy
know?’
‘She probably suspects. It was a hell of a weekend.’
Mike blew out a long breath, removed his cap, scratched his head and rephced the cap with the bill low over his eyes.
Eric spread his hands. ‘Mike, I’m so damned mixed up. I think I love Maggie.’
Mike studied his brother thoughtfully. ‘I figured this was going to happen, the minute I heard she was moving back m town. I know how you were with her in high school. I knew you two were getting it on back then.’
‘You knew?’ Eric’s face registed surprise. ‘Like hell you knew. ‘
‘Don’t look so surprised. It was my car you were borrowing, remember? And Barb and I were getting a little ourselves, so we guessed about you and Maggie.’
‘Damn it, you’re so lucky. Do you know how lucky you two are? I look at you and Barb, and your family, and how you turned out together and I think, why didn’t I grab Maggie back then, and maybe I’d have what you’ve got.’
‘It’s more than luck, and you know it. It’s damned hard work and a lot of compromise.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Eric replied disconsolately.
‘So what about you and Nancy?’
Eric shook his head. ‘That’s a mess.’
‘How so?’
‘In the middle of all this she comes home and says, maybe she’ll have a baby after all.
Maybe one wouldn’t be so bad.
So I put her to the test. I jumped her then and there without giving her a chance to take any precautions, and she hasn’t talked to me since.’
‘You mean you forced her?’
‘I guess that’s what you’d call it, yeah.’
Mike peered at his brother from beneath his bill-cap and said quietly, ‘Not good, man.’
‘I know.’
‘What the hell were you thinking?’
‘I don’t know. I felt guilty about Maggie, and scared and angry that
Nancy
waited all this time to finally consider having a family.
‘Can I ask you something?’
Eric glanced at his brother, waiting.
‘Do you love her?’
Eric sighed.
Mike waited.
Beneath the pickup the oil gurgled once and stopped running. The smell of it filled the place, mixed with the smokehouse scent of burning maple.
‘Sometimes I get flashes of feeling, but it’s mostly wishing for what might have been. When I first met her it was all physical attraction. I thought she was the greatest-looking woman on the face of the earth. Then after I got to know her I realized how bright she was, and how much ambition she had, and I figured someday she’d succeed at something in a big way. Back then all of that mattered as much as her looks. But you want to know something ironic?’
‘What?’
‘It’s the very things I admired her for that are driving me away. Her business success somehow came to matter more to her than the success of our marriage. And, hell, we don’t share anything anymore. We used to like the same music, now she puts those headphones on and listens to self motivation tapes. When we were first married we’d take clothes to the laundromat together and now she has her dry cleaning done overnight while she’s in hotels. We don’t even like the same kinds of food anymore. She eats health food and carps at me about eating doughnuts all the time.
We don’t use the same cheque book, or the same doctors, or even the same bar of soap! She hates my snowmobile, my pickup, our house - Christ, Mike, I thought when people were married they were supposed to grow together!.’
Mike crooked his arms around his updrawn knees.
‘If you don’t love her you have no business trying to persuade her to have a baby, much less jumping her without a condom.’
‘I know.’ Eric hung his head. In time he shook it forlornly. ‘Aw hell...’ He stared at the stove. ‘Falling out of love is a bitch. It really hurts.’
Mike rose and went to his brother, clapping an arm around Eric’s shoulders. ‘Yeah.’ They remained that way awhile listening to the snap of the fire, surrounded by its warmth and the familiar smells of hot cast iron and motor oil. ‘Years ago they had shared the same bedroom and an old iron bed. They had shared both the praises and punishments of their parents, and sometimes - when it was dark and neither of them could sleep- their hopes and dreams. They felt as close now at the crumbling of one of their dreams as they had upon disclosing them as lads.
‘So what do you want to do?’ Mike asked.
‘I want to marry Maggie, but she says I’m probably thinking with my glands right now.’
Mike laughed.
‘Besides, she’s not ready to get married again. She wants to be a businesswoman for a while, and I guess I can’t blame her for that. Hell, she hasn’t even taken in her first customer yet, and after all the money she sank into that house, she wants a chance to see it go.’
‘So you came to me asking what you ought to do about
Nancy
, but I can’t answer. Would it bother you to let it ride for a while?’
‘It seems so damned dishonest. I had a hell of a dine keeping from telling her this weekend and making a clean break, but Maggie made me promise I’d give it some time.’
After a moment’s thought, Mike squeezed Eric’s shoulder. ‘Tell you what let’s do.’ He turned Eric towards the truck. ‘Let’s get this oil changed and take the snowmobiles out for a ride. That always clears the head.’
They were men who’d been born in the north where winter makes up nearly half the year. They’d learned young how to appreciate the bright blues and stark whites of it, the sturdiness of skeletal trees, the beauty of snow-draped branches, of purple shadows and red barns against the white landscape.
They drove south, to
From the distance came a garbled yodel. ‘O-owaowa wa-wa.’ A flock of birds lifted from the water, their long, thin tails trailing behind .like giant stingers - old squaws, summer residents of the
Arctic Circle
on southern holiday in
Inland, the riders passed sumac and dogwood whose red berries shone like jewels against the snow, then on beneath a cathedral of hemlock and white pine branches, and into a copse of yellow birch laden with seed catkins where redpolls were having a repast. They followed a deer trail of dainty footprints where the animals had been dallying, and eventually came upon great pock marks where the deer had broken into a run and plunged down a steep dune where their bounding hooves had left great explosions of white, like giant doilies, upon the snow.
Blue jays swooped before them, scolding in their un pretty voices, and for a time a pileated woodpecker led them from one bend to the next. They found craters where deer had slept, a running spring where mink, mouse and squirrel had drunk.
They drove on to an ice-covered reservoir near
They sat for a time on a bluff above
Nearby, a nuthatch sang its tuneless note While the ice below shifted and belched. A woodpecker hammered in a dead birch. Somewhere on the south end of
‘I think that’s wise.’
‘Maggie doesn’t know what she wants either.’
‘But if you take up with her again you should make the break with
Nancy
right away.’
‘I will. I promise.’
‘Okay, then, let’s go home.’
January advanced. He said nothing to
Nancy
and kept his promise not to call or see Maggie, though he missed her with a hollow-bellied intensity. In early February he and Mike attended the Sports Show in
Chicago
where they rented a disphy booth, passed out literature, pitched prospective customers and booked charters for the upcoming fishing season. They were long, tiring days when they talked until their throats were sore, stood until their feet hurt, lived primarily on hot’ dogs available from vendors on the showroom floor, and slept poorly in strange hotel rooms.
He returned to Fish Creek to an empty house, a note from
Nancy
outlining her itinerary for the week, and the telephone only a reach away. A dozen times he passed it and thought how simple it would be to pick it up and dial Maggie’s number. Talk about the show, the bookings they’d made, his week, her week - the things he should be talking to his wife about. In the end he resisted.
One day he went uptown to get the mail and passed Vera Pearson on the sidewalk. It was a windy day and she hurried with her head down, holding a scarf against her chin. When she heard his footsteps approaching from the opposite direction she looked up, and her footsteps slowed. Then her expression turned hard as she quickened her pace and moved on without any further acknowledgement.
During the third week of February he and Mike went to the Boat, Sports and Travel Show in
Minneapolis
. On the second day there a woman came into the booth who resembled Maggie. She was taller and had paler hair, but the resemblance was uncanny and brought Eric a sharp sexual reaction. He closed the button on his sports coat as he moved toward her.
‘Hello, may I answer any questions?’
‘Not really. But I’d like to take your brochure for my husband.’
‘Sure. We’re Severson’s Charters, and we run two boats out of Gills Rock in northern
Door County
,
‘
‘Straight north of
Green Bay
, on the peninsula.’
Facts, pertinent questions, answers and a polite thank you. But once, while they talked, their eyes met directly and though they were total strangers, a recognition passed between them: in another time, another place, given other circumstances, they would have spoken of things other than salmon fishing.
As she left the booth, the woman glanced back one last time and smiled with Maggie’s brown eyes, and Maggie’s cleft chin, leaving him with so strong an impression of her that it distracted him for the remainder of the day.
That night after he’d showered and switched off the television set, he sat on the edge of his bed, a white towel girding his hips, his hair damp and finger-filled. From the nightstand he picked up his watch.
.
He laid it down and studied the phone. It was beige- did any hotel in
America
buy phones in any other colour? - the luckless colour of things once alive. He picked up the receiver and read the instructions for long-distance dialling, changed his mind and cracked it back down.
Maggie knew him well, knew that even this indiscretion would create twinges of conscience.