The Divide (21 page)

This astonishing declaration (he astonished even himself) wasn’t something Ben had rehearsed or intended. It wasn’t his clubfooted version of the master Martin’s seduction technique. And as he heard himself spilling his true feelings as if in some parody of a confessional, he was of course aware of what a foolish risk he was taking, how nothing was more likely to scare her off. But he didn’t stop.

Instead, in a quiet, measured voice he went on to say that since their evening together in New York, he had been driving himself crazy, wondering what to do and how to get to see her again, that he had several times tried to write her a letter but hadn’t been able to find the right words.

He was now talking mostly to his hands clasped on the table before him. Every so often he lifted his eyes to assess what effect his words might be having but all he could detect was a sort of suspended surprise. Then, just as he was finishing, she glanced at his hands and he realized that all this time he had been fiddling with his wedding ring.

He smiled and shrugged.

“Well, there you go,” he said.

There was a long silence. She sat back and stared at him.

“Well,” she said at last. “I don’t know what to say.”

“I’m sorry. You don’t have to say anything.”

“Oh, okay.”

“No, I mean, you asked me why I was here, so you obviously knew it wasn’t just about the pictures. And I thought, hell, why pretend? Just tell her.”

She picked up her wineglass and drank, watching him all the time.

“So it wasn’t my work you were interested in after all.”

“Your paintings are wonderful.”

“So do I get the job?”

“If you want it.”

“Phew! Well, that’s all that matters.”

They sat awhile, smiling sadly at each other.

“Aren’t you supposed to say Sarah doesn’t understand you?”

“I think she does, as a matter of fact. Too well, probably. We’re just not the same people anymore. I’d really appreciate it if you’d cover up those shoulders.”

She slowly pulled on her cardigan.

“Or maybe don’t,” he said.

“Tell me, do you do this a lot?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Thanks.”

The waitress arrived and asked if they were finished and she looked a little puzzled when they laughed. Ben asked for the check. When the woman had gone, Eve reached across the table and held his hand.

“Ben, I like you very much. But I’ve never been involved with a married man and I’m not going to start now. If you were free, it might be different.”

They kissed good-bye in the street like friends and she walked away up the hill without looking back. The snow had stopped but he had to clear a good six inches of it off the truck’s windshield. He drove to his hotel in a state of boyish elation. And the next morning, as his plane banked north and east against the cloudless cobalt, he looked down on the mountains puckered like scars across the white of the desert and felt a kind of soaring clarity.

He was going home. But it was a word whose meaning had changed, a place that in his heart, he had already left. Even though she hadn’t actually said it, what he had heard was that she would have him if he made himself free. And with the reckless bliss of the ignorant, he had already begun the process.

I
t was hard to get lost in Missoula even if you wanted to. Wherever you were, all you had to do to get your bearings was look around and find the big letter M, embossed in white halfway up the steep shoulder of grass that reared on the south bank of the Clark Fork River. Though only a hill, it was called Mount Sentinel and if you had the legs and lungs and inclination to hike the trail that zigzagged up it, you could stand by the M and gaze out across the town at a travel-brochure shot of forest and mountain dusted from early fall with snow. Assuming you could take your eyes off it, if you looked down, just above the toes of your boots, laid out at the foot of the hill was the campus of the University of Montana.

It was a tranquil, pleasant place, though its older buildings, crafted in red brick a century ago, seemed to be striving for a grandeur eschewed by the more modern ones. The hub of the campus was a broad expanse of grass known as The Oval where in the summer students liked to lounge in the sun and play Frisbee. Quartered by paths of gray stone and red cobbles salvaged from the streets of downtown Missoula, it had once been graced with stately American elms that one by one had fallen to disease. Apart from a few brave ponderosas, their successors—maple, red oak, and honey locust—still looked young and vulnerable. To protect them, stationed on a plinth of gray cement at The Oval’s western entrance, stood a massive grizzly bear.

He was on his hind legs, glowering into the distance, jaws parted in a silent snarl of bronze, as if sensing some imminent attack. And to those who knew their recent history, the posture was not inappropriate. For in the thirty-odd years he had stood there, the college had been under regular and rigorous assault. Conservative Montana—and that meant most of it—viewed the place as a cauldron seething with liberal poison, the most potent of which was brewed in the building just behind the bear’s shoulder.

Rankin Hall stood on a base of rough-hewn rock up which twelve stout steps led to an arched double door flanked by classical pillars. In the hallway, among the posters and cartoons and notices of upcoming concerts and exhibitions, hung a framed sepia photograph of the woman for whom the building was named. In her feathered hat, high-collared shirt, and somber suit, Jeannette Rankin, suffragist, pacifist, and the first woman ever elected to the nation’s House of Representatives, looked far too demure a figure to be presiding over such a hotbed of controversy. But that was exactly what she was doing, for Rankin Hall was the home of the university’s notorious environmental studies program.

Born in the protest years of the Vietnam War, it took a self-effacing pride in grooming activists, who—or so its critics claimed—had gone on to wreck the state’s economy by robbing it of thousands of jobs in mining and logging, with the alleged result that Montanans now had the forty-sixth lowest per capita income in the union. That the truth was, of course, more complex hadn’t dampened conservative efforts to shut the program down. There were constant attempts to rein it in and slash its funding. Professors were accused of giving credits to students who demonstrated or spiked trees or locked themselves to logging trucks. And once, on the touching assumption that a wall map of Montana forests, dotted with colored pins, was in fact an official tree-spiking master plan, federal agents brandishing guns had stormed the place and later slunk out with large streaks of egg on their faces.

None of this notoriety was known to Abbie Cooper when she set her heart on coming here to college. And if it had been, she wouldn’t have breathed a word to anyone, especially not her grandfather, who considered her choice not simply an aberration but almost a personal slight. Perhaps a little reluctantly, her mom had sided with him, echoing his view that it was a sin for someone of Abbie’s talents not, at the very least, to check Harvard out first. Abbie’s dad, predictably, was already on her side. But as a concession to her mom and grandpa she agreed to take the tour and, in a conspiring gray drizzle, trudged with a lengthening face around Cambridge and later (
Honey, come on, please, it’s only down the road
) around Wellesley.

That evening, to nobody’s surprise, she had announced, with more than a touch of melodrama, that she would rather stack shelves in Wal-Mart than go to either one of them. And that was when her mom gave up and the deal was done. She would go to UM where she was duly promised a place for the following fall. She would major, naturally, in environmental studies.

The summer after her high-school graduation was the best of her life. She spent two weeks in Wyoming with Ty, working on the ranch. She had been planning to stay longer, but he was getting a little too keen and though she liked him a lot, Abbie wasn’t ready for the kind of commitment he seemed to want. Two weeks earlier than scheduled, she flew to Vancouver and signed on with Greenpeace.

The work was neither taxing nor truly exciting but the people she met more than compensated and she forged many new friendships. The high points were the trips they made by sea kayak, exploring the wild inlets farther up the coast. They watched bears scoop salmon from the shallows and paddled among pods of orcas, so close you could have reached out and touched them. At night they camped at the water’s edge, listening to the blow of whales in the bay and the distant howl of wolves in the forest above.

The only shadows on these long idyllic days were the seabirds they found, dead and dying in the rock pools, their feathers clogged with oil sludge. They saved those they could but most were too far gone. The sight of their suffering seemed to light a wick of anger in Abbie’s heart.

She flew home in August, with just a week to get ready for UM. Her mom was edgy and fragile and there was a sadness about her that Abbie hadn’t seen before. Her dad too seemed somehow different, quieter, a little preoccupied. When asked, her mom made light of it, saying they had both been working too hard and hadn’t been able to take a vacation. Josh had just come home from a month with the Bradstocks on Lake Michigan and spent most of the week on the phone with Katie or moping in his room. Abbie found it all a little depressing.

The night before she was due to fly out to Missoula, her mom came into Abbie’s room while she was packing the last of her things. The image seemed suddenly too much for her and she broke down and cried. Abbie put her arms around her.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do this,” she sniffed, trying to sound cheery. “I’m just being silly. I think moms are allowed a few tears when their little girls leave home.”

“Oh, Mom. I’ll be back.”

“I know.”

“Is that all it is? Really?”

“Why? Isn’t it enough? Listen, you’re going to have such a fabulous time. I’m just jealous, that’s all.”

 

 

 

Abbie’s room at UM was in Knowles Hall, a neat but unprepossessing four floors of brick and cement whose only flourish was a white-scalloped porch stacked with bicycles. It stood just off The Oval in a walkway lined with sugar maples which now, after the first harsh frost of fall, were turning from fiery orange to red. The room itself, midway along one of six identical corridors, was furnished with beds, desks, chairs, and bookcases in plain pine, two of each, which Abbie and her roommate had arranged to give each other at least an illusion of privacy. Luckily and perhaps a little surprisingly, the two of them got along just fine.

Melanie Larsen came from a little town outside of Appleton, Wisconsin. She was a farmer’s daughter and looked it. Blond, ruddy-faced, and with thighs and shoulders that suggested she could single-handedly haul a John Deere from a bog, she too was majoring in environmental studies. Whereas the walls in Abbie’s corner of the room were decorated with posters of mountains and wild animals and heroes like John Lennon and Che Guevara, Mel’s had just three prettily framed photographs of her mom and dad, her four brothers, and of herself hugging a Hereford heifer who had scooped all the prizes at the local 4-H contest.

Mel was so boisterous and gregarious that in just a couple of months, their room had become a sort of social epicenter. The door was rarely closed. Today, however, it was. And the pad that was fixed to it, a pencil dangling on a string, was by now a mosaic of messages.

And so on. It was lunchtime, when normally friends dropped by with coffee and sandwiches they had just bought at La Peak, the little café across the walkway in the Lommasson Center. In ones and twos, every few minutes, friends would come drifting down the corridor and see the closed door. They would frown, maybe knock and listen for a moment, and when they heard nothing, they would shrug, scribble a message, then shamble back along the corridor to the stairwell. Abbie and Mel weren’t home and nobody knew why.

Abbie was beginning to wish she was. The pain was getting so intense, she was afraid she wasn’t going to last out. It came in nauseous spasms that left her close to tears. But she was damned if she was going to let them see her cry. There wasn’t a part of her that didn’t hurt. She hurt in places she never knew she had.

For the last five hours she had been sitting locked by her neck to a metal gate. It felt like five days. The lock was the kind they used for bicycles, U-shaped and made of toughened steel, and the crossbar to which it was fixed was so high that her spine felt as if it had stretched several inches already. Whenever she tried to relax, the lock tried to garrote her. The bruises on her neck must have swollen because the lock seemed to be getting tighter and tighter. She had to keep telling herself not to panic.

The morning had been sunny and, for late October, unusually mild. But then the wind had shifted north and the clouds rolled in and the temperature started to plummet. The damp cold of the red-dirt road had at last found its way through the tarp they had given her to sit on and through all her layers of Gore-Tex and thermal underwear and was now rising like an icy fog into every bone of her body. All she could hope was that soon she would go numb.

“How are you doing, sister?” Hacker called.

Abbie forced a grin. Even that hurt.

“Great,” she said.

“Getting cold?”

“No, I’m fine.”

By now it was quite a party. Including Abbie and her ten fellow protesters, there were probably forty or fifty people and a whole fleet of vehicles parked down the hill, another one just pulling up as she looked. There were Forest Service agents, the county sheriff and a whole posse of deputies, people from the logging company, newspaper reporters and photographers, all standing around watching and chatting and waiting for something to happen. Even the perky little guy from the Forest Service who all morning had been videoing everything seemed to have run out of ideas and was now leaning on the hood of his truck looking as bored as the rest of them. The freezing air was filled with the crackle and blurt of a dozen shortwave radios and the constant underlying throb of the helicopter that all morning had been hoisting felled lodgepole out of the valley below. The truck that had just arrived belonged to a local TV station. The reporter and her cameraman were ambling up the hill toward them. Hacker started up the chant again.