Man in The Woods (21 page)

She points to a bottle of salad dressing. “Except for that, which Paul Newman takes credit for.” Kate hears the defensiveness in her own voice and thinks about adding something to her next broadcast about her need to apologize for serving ready-made food.

Ruby, slouched in her chair, with her chin on her sternum, stares at a manila folder on her lap, while reaching for the bread plate and taking five slices of baguette, each the shape of a small kidney.

“What do you have in your lap?” Paul asks Ruby.

She doesn’t reply, except to point to her mouth, into which she has already placed a piece of bread.

“Plate please,” says Kate, reaching toward Paul.

“Not too much,” he says.

“I know,” says Kate, as neutrally as possible. She gives him a small amount of everything. She has chosen it all with him in mind, as though this is the meal that is going to restore his appetite. “Sweetie?” she says, reaching toward Ruby.

“There’s a birdy fairy angel on the wall,” Ruby says, pointing to a spot directly behind Kate.

“There is?” Kate says, turning around to look. But all that is visible is an eleven-by-fourteen pencil drawing of a bowl filled with eggs, made by a woman in Kate’s AA meeting. “Is it pretend?”

Ruby shakes her head no, not emphatically but more as if she were keeping matters straight in her own mind. She looks down at the folder in her lap, for a moment, and then looks up at Kate, her little face full of defiance and fear, like a child looking back at her poor mother as the train pulls away from the station and the mother is thinking,
Why did you leave me?
and the daughter is thinking,
Why did you let me go?

When all the plates are full, Kate bows her head. “Thank you Lord for this time together.” She stops, thinks. There is a vast internal silence. Something she thought was there does not seem to be present after all; it’s like thinking you have heard the voices of loved ones coming from another room, but when you open the door and look around all is emptiness. Maybe Jesus does not want to be talked to right now, and that is fine with Kate.

Ruby has folded her hands and bowed her head, awaiting her mother’s prayer, but now, in the long silence, she unclasps her fingers and jams her hand past the waistband of her blue jeans. She leans far to one side, putting all her weight on her left buttock while hoisting up the right, which she proceeds to scratch with a single-mindedness that seems more animal than human.

“Ruby?” Kate says. The child looks up at her with dark, opaque eyes. “Do you feel itchy?”

“No,” says Ruby.

“How about this—stop scratching and let’s eat,” says Kate.

The meal begins. Moments pass and no one is talking, there is just the busy, arrhythmic clatter of silverware, until Kate speaks up. “So Ruby, school.” Ruby looks up from her plate, as if she has just heard the roar of a lion. “Anything interesting?” Kate prompts. “Anything exciting, strange. Delightful? Weird? Anything?”

“I don’t know,” Ruby says. She puts her eating utensils down, looks pleadingly at her mother. The fingernails on her right hand, the hand with which she had been scratching at herself, are dark.

“Nothing?” Kate asks. “Eight hours of your life and nothing to report?”

Ruby clears her throat. “Maybe Jeremiah’s mother came to our class and told us…” She sees Paul looking at her fingernails and she quickly tucks her hands beneath her buttocks, and rocks back and forth on them.

“Told you what?” Kate asks.

“I don’t know,” says Ruby. “Everything.” She laughs. The laugh must be nervous, or false, but it sounds uproarious, unhinged. “Birdy Fairy Angel says I need to wash my hands,” Ruby declares, jumping up from her seat. The manila folder falls to the carpet, spilling its contents—a crayon profile of a pert young girl, with a button nose, long eyelashes, and a ponytail, another page with nothing but frantic scribbles, as if it was made by an automaton that had sprung a gear.

“You can wash your hands in the downstairs bathroom,” Kate calls after her, but Ruby pounds up the stairs, and the next sound is the boom of a slammed door. “Something’s not right there,” Kate says.

“It’s hard work, being a kid,” Paul says, pushing his food around his plate. Bad emotional weather is setting in. He has lost his appetite, which is particularly disheartening because this was one meal he thought he would actually eat and enjoy.

“Not happening, huh,” Kate says, gesturing with her chin to the food on Paul’s plate.

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s good though.”

“Yes,” says Kate, “I’m glad the tines of your fork are enjoying it, but I was hoping for a little more.” The unintentional sharpness in her voice is an age-old error she doesn’t wish to remake, and she reaches across the table to touch Paul’s arm. “Do you want me to get your protein drink and vitamins?”

“No, it’s okay, I already took them.”

“You took them already? You knew you weren’t going to eat?”

“No, I thought I was going to eat. I thought for sure.”

“Then why did you take your protein drink and the vitamins?” Kate asks.

“Because it was six o’clock, and at six o’clock that’s what I do.”

Kate shakes her head. “Okay, I know that in the world according to Paul what you just said makes perfect sense, so we’ll leave it at that.” She reaches for his plate. “Before you give it to the dog,” she says.

He hands his plate over, and it feels like turning in his membership card to the club of normal life.

“By the way,” Kate says, “I noticed Evangeline leaving this afternoon. She looked quite upset. And I was thinking to myself how strange that is. Because the Evangeline I see, which is, of course, the Evangeline she chooses to show me, is always smiling.”

Paul says, “I guess I’m so used to her, I don’t even think about things like that. But you know what we should do?” He gestures toward the glazed doors he put into the west wall of the dining room. They are nine feet tall, about sixty-five percent glass, the rest pine, painted white. The doors open up to a bluestone patio and they face in a southwesterly direction; sometimes so much sunlight comes through them that Kate needs to draw the curtains. “We should put transoms over the doors. Right in the space between the tops of the doors and the ceiling molding. That way, when the curtains are closed, light will still come in. And I love transoms. There’s something about a transom.”

“Which brings us back to Evangeline,” Kate says. “What’s going on there? Is she a tiny bit falling in love with you?”

“Are you being serious?” Paul asks.

“I don’t care how gay she is,” Kate says. “Love is love and it tears down walls. You taught me that.”

“She’s not in love with me. We work together. We like each other.”

“So what was going on?” Kate asks. “Was she upset about something or was it just my imagination?”

“I made her a partner in my business,” Paul says.

“Seriously?” Kate says, more quickly than she would have liked.

Boom, boom, boom, Ruby is coming down the stairs, as heavy as a conquistador in full armor.

“Yes, she’s there every day,” Paul says. “And she can’t even afford to fix her car.”

“Why not give her a raise?” Kate asks. She can feel the falseness of her own smile, the strain of it, its perilous proximity to a grimace.

“I don’t know,” Paul says. “It didn’t feel like the way to go. And I’ll say this: it felt good. As soon as I said it, I thought you were right.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense,” Kate says.

“About God, I mean,” Paul all but whispers. “I felt it, the energy of…of something. It was amazing.”

Ruby enters the dining room and makes her way to the table; the dishes and silverware tremble at her approach. “Ruby, please,” Kate says. “You just can’t walk like that. It’s abusive.”

The girl’s face is piebald, flushed here, cadaver-white there, and her eyes twinkle like Christmas lights. The cuffs of her taupe long-sleeved T-shirt are wet, dark. She bumps the pointer finger of her left hand against the pointer finger of her right hand, over and over, and she sits heavily at her place. She sniffs her food and apparently it is all right because she begins to eat.

“You okay there, Ruby?” Paul asks.

“I don’t understand why you’d do that,” Kate is saying. “No wonder she looked like that when I saw her after work. She must have been out of her mind with happiness, or something.”

“Happy is good,” Paul says. “We’re all for happy.”

“Goddamn it to hell, Paul,” Kate says.

“Goddamn it to hell, Paul,” adds Ruby, her voice an eerily accurate reproduction of her mother’s.

“All right, enough,” Kate says to Ruby. “This is serious.”

“Okay!” Ruby says brightly, “everybody stand in line and flappy fly.”

Kate makes a gesture of small exasperation. “What does that mean?” she asks, but Ruby mumbles what sounds like
sorry
, and then concentrates on her food, which is just as well for Kate because she wants to pursue the matter of Evangeline with Paul.

“So now you two are partners?” Kate says.

“She’s there every day,” Paul says. “She does the work, I mean it wouldn’t be happening without her. And she’s really learned a lot. She believes in what we’re doing. So I guess we were partners all along, except we never said it.”

Kate feels wild with exasperation, and she struggles to keep herself in check. When it comes to verbal jousting, she knows that Paul is not a true match for her—they both know this. For the most part, Kate uses the knowledge of her prowess as a means of restraint, a way to argue with him less frequently and with less force, even though talking things through, even heatedly, even heedlessly, is ultimately soothing to her. The flow of words has a calming effect, just as boxers say that hitting someone leaves them feeling tranquil.

“You know, Paul,” Kate says, her voice so calm she almost sounds drugged, “it is not the same. If she’s a partner that means you can’t fire her. I’m not saying you should fire her or that you would ever, but it’s a very different relationship. Before, you were the boss and she was the employee. Now you’re equal.”

“I don’t want to fire anyone,” Paul says. “And I don’t want to be
able
to fire anyone. It’s inhuman.”

“It’s inhuman?” Kate asks. Her voice has started to rise but she pulls it back down. “It’s not inhuman, it’s how people live. It’s how people have always lived. It’s how work gets done; it’s how the world works. Someone is the boss, someone is the worker, there’s a chain of command.”

She takes a deep breath and does her best to look detached, amused, yet some smaller version of herself that lives within her spits out the words she would never allow herself to say aloud:
I am carrying seven-eighths of the financial burden of this house and our life and you suddenly decide to give away half of your business to a twenty-five-year-old girl who is clearly in love with you?

“Uh-oh, the birdy angel is back,” Ruby says, pointing to the wall. All those outsized, inexplicable, seemingly unsupportable emotions she has been displaying over the past year or two suddenly seem like rehearsals for this moment, because now when her eyes widen and her voice rises in dismay and she shrinks back into her chair as if from the fires of hell, there seems not a jot of play or exaggeration in it. Whatever Ruby has been practicing for is here.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Hey Sonny,” says Kate, “may I ask you a question?” Though Sonny is her driver, he is also an AA pal. They meet every Wednesday evening in a church basement with about twenty other Leydenites ranging from a retired pediatrician to a young shoplifter. It was Kate who, sensing his alcoholism when he first drove her—the smell of that metabolizing booze was unmistakable, as were the sea-creature eyes—teased Sonny into the program, and though there is a bit of Kabuki theater ritual in how they both acknowledge and ignore each other at meetings, Sonny always brings her a cup of coffee before the meeting begins and Kate always gives him a little kiss, which in her case means a foil-wrapped chocolate drop from Hershey. “I’m curious about the bumper sticker on the back of your car. ‘All Men Are Idiots and My Husband Is Their King’? Why do you have that?”

“Oh boy,” Sonny Briggs says. “I meant to scrape that little son of a gun off it.”

Sonny has made an effort to elevate his level of service, which he realizes is more about presentation than it is about driving, though he does, in fact, pride himself on his driving style, which is contained and relaxed, steady in speed, with a minimum of lane changes. So that he may appear more businesslike, his hair, once a monument to hell-raising testosterone, in the style of his father’s old favorite, Con-way Twitty, is now closely barbered, and he wears what he hopes will pass for a chauffeur’s cap but which is, in fact, an Amtrak ticket-taker’s hat, given to him by his cousin. The job of driving Kate to New York, waiting the hour and a half it takes her to make her radio broadcast, and then driving her back to Leyden pays Sonny more than half of what he needs to get by every week.

They are nearing the city. They pass a cluster of houses and a large, glassy pond completely overtaken by Canada geese, a thousand of them at least. Kate marvels at the beauty of all those elegant birds with their long necks and pompous waddle and white chin straps, but her view of them is mixed with dread—why would so many geese be gathered here a mile or two outside of Tarrytown? And with that thought the entire landscape seems to tilt—the rambling white houses look suddenly shabby and in need of paint jobs, the green of the grass appears to be too dark and maybe it’s more goose shit than grass, the trees seem pitched at odd angles and unstable, and the sky, which moments ago was a bright, goofy blue like a pair of golfing trousers, now has darkened to purple, the color of a funereal sash worn by a minister standing next to an open grave.
Get me out of here
, Kate thinks.

“So Sonny,” Kate says, “talk to me.” She sees his questioning eyes appear in the rearview mirror and just as quickly they disappear. “How’s business?”

Sonny can never decide if it’s better to tell people you’re doing well, or if you should accentuate the negative and perhaps put them on your side. He has plenty of problems he could talk about. Insurance rates are going up. His back feels like the vertebrae are getting compressed by all the sitting. Yet his wife, Chantal, gives him massages at night and when they go out together she insists on driving because she says it’s his turn to relax and let someone else do the work. And as boring as this job is and as uncertain, it’s still better than roofing, which he did for eight years, with the wind in his face, the doomy stench of tar in his lungs, and his legs shaking from fear because not a day went by when he didn’t have a premonition of sliding off the roof and landing on some flagstone patio, and his head exploding like a jar of jelly.

They are closing in on the city now and the traffic, negligible on the Taconic Parkway, is getting heavy on the Saw Mill. Open space, which turned into single-family houses, has become apartment buildings now, modest brick five-story dwellings, close to the road, interspersed with industrial yards, small offices, a parking lot for trash-collecting trucks.

“The thing I love about driving people,” Sonny says, “is the people. All sorts of people. I figured I’d be driving bankers and the cream of the puff, but half the people I drive around are poor folks. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”

“You’re right,” Kate says, her voice almost giddy with her relief over having something to talk about. “What are poor people doing with a car service?”

“Poor people sometimes don’t have cars. And up where we live, you got to have transportation. Can’t take a bus because there ain’t no bus, and you can’t walk it because most things are too far. So this one lady, every Monday at one in the afternoon I pick her up and I take her to the Grand Union and she does her shopping for the week, and then I drive her home.”

“That must cost more than her groceries,” Kate says.

“It ain’t cheap,” Sonny agrees. “I got another customer who needs me to pick him up for doctor appointments, and I drive one guy in to see his parole officer. I guess back in the day you used to have neighbor helping neighbor, but now it’s pretty much everyone for themselves.” He shrugs, realizes how good that feels, how it relieves the tension in his shoulders and his neck, and he shrugs a few more times, just for the pleasure of it, and the pleasure somehow emboldens him. “That’s one thing I think a new president might bring back,” Sonny says. “Neighbor helping neighbor, and not everyone looking up to some powerful government bureaucrat to fix everything.”

“Like what new president?” Kate asks, fearing the worst.

“I don’t know, just not what we’ve got right now,” says Sonny. “I was pretty much behind that Senator McCain, mostly because of what he went through. But you know that Governor Bush out of Texas is one of us.”

“George Bush?” exclaims Kate. “You’ve got to be kidding me. That little spoiled brat?”

Sonny smiles. You’ve got to be a damned fool to argue politics with a customer. “I guess so,” he says, “but doesn’t it sort of make you sick the way Clinton was cheating on everyone like that?”

“I don’t care, Sonny,” Kate says, leaning back, adjusting her legs. “All men are idiots and my president is their king.”

Kate’s eyes come to rest on her black silk-and-linen pants, and she sees a couple of long, curled brown dog hairs pressed into the fabric, like veins in a leaf. Shep. The hairs are oddly resistant to her efforts to pluck them free. At last, using her thumbnail and fingernail as tweezers, she lifts them off her pants, but when she drops them to the floor of the car, rather than fall they outwit gravity and rise and drift right back to her leg.

She is not now nor has she ever been particularly fond of dogs, or cats, or any other four-legged creatures, and a lifetime spent listening to various friends prattle on about their pets has been an ongoing marathon of false smiles and empty nods. Their anagrammatic relationship to God notwithstanding, it has always struck Kate that something fundamentally foul is at the root of every dog. Anus, tongue, cascading fur, farts and meaty breath, black claws, icy teeth, and ostensibly adoring eyes, eyes that Kate perceived as primarily
watchful
, the eyes of a hunter mated with a scavenger. In high school Kate had a boyfriend named Rick Laval, a half-Cajun son of a local lawyer, and a boy of delicate bone structure and limited interests. Rick spoke on very few subjects, but one of them was Dolly, his family’s water dog, and it was from Rick that Kate learned the immutable law governing men and their dogs, which is you don’t want to stand between them. Rick, who seemed tongue-tied when it came to making an apology or stating his feelings or even making a plan, never ran out of things to say about Dolly, even going so far as to touch on her dream life, which, according to Rick, was full of cross-country chases and heart-pounding pond crossings. Kate did not mind Dolly’s company, nor did she begrudge the ferocious affection she inspired in Rick; all Kate asked was to be spared having to join in the hysteria surrounding the dog and to be likewise spared having to pretend that the dog had complex feelings that were not appreciably different from Joni Mitchell’s or Vanessa Redgrave’s.

Paul is
not
that sort of man, his adoration of Shep notwithstanding. His affection is cleaner, more reasonable. The very thought of him makes Kate want to pull her cell phone out of her purse and call him. She won’t, though, because he maintains a mid-century attitude toward telephones, believing that they’re for the transmission of important, brief messages. The idea of talking on the phone aimlessly and at length because you miss someone makes as much sense to him as looking at pictures of food because you are hungry.

Yet she would love to hear his voice right now, even its tinny approximation through the ear holes of her mobile phone. Memories of his many kindnesses swarm within her. Holy is the silence he affords her when he sees she is thinking, holy are the windows he has placed in her house, in her life, and her soul, holy is the smell of wood, holy is the carpenter, holy is his gaze when she is speaking, holy is the catch in his breath when she kisses him, holy is his come, holy are his balls, holy is the weight of him, holy is the sweet attention he pays to Ruby, holy is his love of trees, holy are the steps he takes upon the face of the earth, holy is his driving fast behind her car and catching up with her to give her the notebook she has forgotten, holy are the stacks of firewood beside her stove, holy are his folded hands as he listens intently to what she reads aloud, holy are the hands that gently pat her to sleep when it’s one of those nights, holy holy holy is the touch of his fingertips as he passes her chair, holy are his tears when he thinks of the harm he has done, holy is his sudden thirst for absolution, holy is his stumbling circular path to God…

In front of them, the George Washington Bridge is so vividly reflected in the Hudson’s still waters that it looks like the top and bottom of a playing card. The sky is a soiled metropolitan blue, and beneath it, all along the curve of Manhattan, the buildings line up to display their wealth and accomplishment, from the Parisian placidity of Riverside Drive to the clunky exclamation points of the World Trade towers on the island’s southern tip.

Her show is not a live feed but is taped, and Todd Hoffman, the show’s producer, will wait for her, but nevertheless Kate’s stomach churns nervously at the prospect of a long delay. She doesn’t want to inconvenience anyone, and she doesn’t want to be perceived as someone who makes others wait for her. Beyond that, if she can get into the station by one, be out of there by two-thirty, she will miss the afternoon rush out of the city, which sometimes begins as early as three, and be home again not much later than four o’clock. If Kate misses her opportunity to get out of the city before the commuter exodus she is faced with postponing her return trip until eight in the evening. Sonny doesn’t mind crawling along, but her own psychic metabolism is thrown into a tumbler by rush hour’s frequent, inexplicable stops followed by little forward bursts of ten or fifteen seconds’ duration. So far, she has been caught in the city only once, and it is not something that she wants to put herself or Sonny through again.

Her impatience to get back to Leyden is about having time with Paul, before Ruby needs to be picked up at Children First, where she sees a learning specialist—if, that is, Paul is willing to end his workday and Evangeline can pick up on the conjugal vibe and go home.

Most of the planning and machinations that are necessarily a part of their love life are done by Kate. It is not that Paul is indifferent to their life in bed together, but he is in this matter as in every other matter maddeningly ad hoc. He does not seem to understand that if they are both awake at seven in the morning they have exactly thirty minutes before the duck-shaped alarm clock starts quacking on Ruby’s bedside table, nor does it seem to occur to him that if he has an appointment to give blood on Wednesday, that makes Tuesday a good time to have sex because they have both learned—at least she has, and he ought to have—that exhaustion follows his biweekly pint. Also on the subject of blood: Paul remains thoroughly unaware of her menstrual cycle, letting the precious days before her bleeding begins go by without any particular sexual interest and then approaching her with urgent, open kisses while she is all plugged up and cannot bear to be touched.

There have been times when she has wondered if his failure to ride herd over time and to force it to yield as many moments as possible for them to be together is not so much a function of his wild-child, creature-of-the-woods spontaneity and his lifelong aversion to structures and schedules, but is really some passive-aggressive tactic to keep their sexual contact down to a minimum, or to have their lovemaking coincide with the ebb and flow of
his
desires. Or it could be—and this is the most disquieting possibility—a way to make
her
responsible for their sexual and emotional health, turning her in effect into a human metronome who maintains the rhythm of their intimate life.

She doesn’t mind doing the work, because of the reward. The slow fill of him as he notches his hips inch by inch closer to her, she enjoys the anticipation of the bright delirium sex unleashes in her, an extremity of emotion and abandon that she has never before experienced and never actually believed other people experienced, either, and she enjoys moving things around in her schedule so there is more time for them to be together. It’s like clearing brush so the flowers can be seen. But there is no question in her mind that if Paul were in her position right now he would not be thinking of how to get out of the city in time to be home so that there was a chance to lie next to her.

Paul in the city is subject to a thousand and one diversions. He might stumble on a Korean restaurant that strikes his fancy, he might run into an old buddy who needs his help unloading a truck, or he might spend an extra hour wandering Central Park trying to find a sycamore tree that he loved as a teenager. These are all lovely traits, part of his casual charisma, but there is one minuscule problem, barely worth a mention: sometimes she wants to wring his neck. After all, not so long ago, he was in the city checking out a job, and if he had turned around immediately and gone back home to her they would have had a whole afternoon to themselves. But what did he do instead? He drove to the East Side and looked for the apartment house where he had found his father’s corpse. And of course he further delayed his journey to Leyden by stopping in Martingham State Park to clear his thoughts, whereas Kate, had she been at the wheel, with Paul up in Leyden, would have been pushing the speed limit trying to get home, and to think of him flicking on his turn signal—no, forget it, he wouldn’t even do that—to think of him suddenly pulling off the Saw Mill and heading for some cathedral of trees where he could make his solitary and inchoate prayers to nature, and to think of all that could be at this very moment so profoundly different in their lives had he not done so, fills Kate with rage, by the way, total, hideous rage, hardly worth mentioning…