The Sabbathday River (12 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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Heather felt her own head nod, encased in heat. “I guess so.” He straightened then and looked at her. He was waiting.
“When?” she said. “When will you come back?”
Ashley smiled, his lips together, the tip of one white tooth revealing itself nonetheless. He told her his name.
“I don't have a car,” said Heather Pratt.
The Logging Road
ASHLEY HAD A CAR. A BATTERED VOLVO, RUSTED and unlovely, the cracked plastic of its gearshift covered with a leather cap worn to the shape of his palm. When she first sat down beside him on the frayed plastic of the front passenger seat, the body of the car seemed to close around them, defining the specific world that was to be theirs alone. It did not occur to her to begrudge the smallness of this world, its arguable tawdriness and lack of comfort. Already it was clear to Heather that whatever destinations she might reach in this car would be the most meaningful she could possibly aspire to.
That first day he drove her through Goddard and into the forest along the Sabbathday, past the place called Nate's Landing, where, already, it was too chilly for children to play in the sandbox or near the water, and then past the Drumlins, past any place she knew the name of. A logging road set off into the forest then, into the unmarked expanse, its spiky pines blazed in occasional orange or ornamented in strips of yellow plastic, like—she thought, she couldn't help thinking—the tree in that song about the prisoner coming home.
Because she was about to come home, Heather knew, the Volvo rocking heavily along its rutted path. Ashley would stop when they got there, and she would look around herself and recognize the contours of her intended place on this earth. Already that place was dear to her. Already she could anticipate nostalgia for it, intense like the nostalgia of exiles amputated from their homelands. She leaned forward in her seat, perched for a first glimpse.
The path opened near a stand of birches, then dissipated in gravel and grass. There simply was no way forward and no farther place to get to. She had never, it seemed to her, felt so thoroughly the sensation of being in exactly the right place. The forest seemed close, not claustrophobic, the air full of sap and pine. Heather felt, rather than saw, his eyes on her. She felt held, as if he were indeed carrying her over some invisible threshold. It was pleasant. It was shattering, but also pleasant. Even in the fraternity room in Hanover she had had no notion of this, of being longed for with such fond violence. Her body wasn't listening to her, if it ever had before. Glancing down at herself, she saw her own limbs move confidently in their new command. It stunned her, watching one wrist tense in the rope of Ashley's hair, the other reach with perfect aim for the narrow sway of his back, its skin electrically hot. The chill air hit her like a smack as he took away her clothing. Somewhere a zipper tore with an understated purr, and then her hips were free. Tights tangled her ankles, hobbling her like a dumb animal: she nearly howled in frustration. Ashley's shirt was gone; somebody's hand had reached back and torn it away over his head, shaking loose the ponytail. His hair was longer than hers, even. Its thick beauty shamed her. She wiped a handful of it across her face and, to her amazement and dismay, it came away slick with tears. She could not imagine a more terrible demonstration of weakness. He would hate her now, Heather thought, but she saw in his face that he did not hate her. Even she could recognize what passion looked like, Heather thought. Even she must recognize love when she saw it. “You're so beautiful,” he said then, as if it had to be confirmed.
Her eyes, without warning, blurred again. She shut them. “I don't see it,” her own voice said, sounding unaccountably weary.
Ashley was over her, his mouth at the lobe of her ear. “But you've never seen yourself like this,” he said, and it was so sensible that she knew he was right. Heather was beautiful, so. She had wanted to be,
and now she was, for him. She understood then that she would never be able to love him enough to show her gratitude.
His miraculous hand untangled her tights and they came away. She did not know where they went. All she wanted on earth was to be bare next to his bareness, and it felt to her that she was twisting wildly, as if she might rid herself of what remained in this way. A bra had never seemed such a ridiculous thing before, so utterly useless but, at the same time, so unnecessarily complicated. She scratched herself, clawing it from her skin. Ashley touched the place to his tongue, a rising welt by the nipple. He kissed the nipple with an open mouth, then he closed his mouth. Breath rushed from her. He took away her underpants and she was glad, because they were wet and they embarrassed her. She was better off without them, Heather thought, reaching for his hand, but his hand was already there.
For one crazy moment she had no thought at all, then all she could think of was that picture, the famous one where God touches Adam and brings him to life, finger to finger. Ashley's finger was in her now. She didn't know she went that deep, really. He seemed to be searching for something, and she wanted him to find it, whatever it was, because he should have what he wanted, anything he wanted. A drone filled the space between their two bodies, but every time he kissed her the sound stopped in her throat. That embarrassed her, too, but she couldn't stop. She began to conjure wants—specific physical necessities. She could not have made sentences of the things she wanted him to do. Her legs went wide around him. The strength of his hand was unbearable.
God gives life to Adam;
it made her laugh. The world turned on Ashley's fingertip. He took his fingertip away.
First it pained her, a cutting pain that flashed to the terminus of each limb with a dull depression hard in its wake. For the swiftest instant Heather saw the murky face of her other lover, her drunken, genial frat boy, and it seemed to her that there must be so little to this vast mythic act, after all, and she had been wrong to come here, even with Ashley, but then Ashley moved and the mood fled. He moved not in and out of her, but around inside her, as if he were stirring her from within, mixing some potion of her innards. She didn't know what to do, and in her frustration began pushing against him—all wrong—until Ashley, without scolding or mocking her, very calmly reached below Heather and lifted her, and showed her how she was not to trouble herself but only hang on. “Better?” He smiled. But she was already away.
Through haze: the rasp of his pointed chin burrowing her collarbone, her burning nipple cooled by his tongue, the sawdust edge to his smell. She catalogued fiercely, hurling them in to think about later, when she could think again, when there wasn't this swirl of distraction around her. His shining hair over her eyes. Her own name spoken in her own ear, like the highest imaginable praise. The pressure churning a spiral at the base of her spine, then shooting to the soles of her feet, the palms of her hands. She couldn't believe what she was hearing, how loud it was, and only the unmistakable sensation from within her own throat could convince her that the voice calling so loudly was her own. He came in a shower of sparks. He loved her that much.
It was sticky between them when he moved. Ashley laughed. Heather was mortified at the noise, which lingered still, trapped around them in the car, but he refused to acknowledge her apology. “It's like that thing in the Bible.” He grinned. “Isn't it?”
“What thing?”
“You know—about the voice crying out in the wilderness.”
Heather smiled at him. He slipped from her, leaving her suddenly bereft. “I wish,” she said suddenly. She wiped her face. He was waiting. “I wish I was a virgin. I mean,” her voice was indistinct, “for you. I wish I was a virgin for you.”
It was dark now, but she could see him clearly. He took a long time to respond, long enough for her to be horrified at what she had said, but he seemed to understand this also, because he shook his head and kissed her.
He drove her home. Heather didn't say anything. He would pick her up the next afternoon—every next afternoon, from now on—and take her to the forest. He left her at the end of the drive and turned the Volvo around. She waited till she couldn't hear it anymore, then she turned and walked through the bald moonlight up to her house. It was a few minutes' walk. Technically, she was pregnant by the time she reached her own front door.
A Coincidence
OF COURSE SHE KNEW HE WAS MARRIED. HE WORE a wedding ring, after all, and Heather wasn't stupid. She also assumed the marriage was happy, since Ashley was too good a man to stay in a marriage that wasn't. He never lied to Heather about these things. He respected her too much for that. He never told her he would leave Sue, or that his wife did not understand him, or even that they no longer had sex together. Sue, his life with Sue, was utterly beside the point as far as Heather was concerned; the point was that, for Heather, Ashley had saved one portion of his bliss. It was a finite portion, and yet it was abundant beyond anything she had ever imagined for herself. It felt unseemly to want more from him.
He collected her every day after work. He waited for her in the parking lot, folding and refolding
The Manchester Union Leader
into wedges to read against the steering wheel, drinking from his thermos of sweet white coffee, not hiding. That he was not ashamed of her filled Heather with helium joy. She reached for the passenger door of the Volvo with a proprietary pleasure she had not felt even in her own home, and took
her own seat beside him. It was the lightest moment of her day, and the moment she most missed on weekends, or on the few afternoons Ashley could not come for her. Even more than the sex, Heather thought, though she craved the sex and was harmed by its lack, as if, without it, some vital substance were draining itself from her and howling for replenishment.
It gave her grace, or seemed to. She was aware of that, swiveling over him or bending herself to his bending, as if they had trained and trained together to make this look effortless. Her naked body became a nude beneath his hands; he had, by some alchemy, charged art into her, and she moved as she imagined a woman in a painting must move, released from her canvas restraints. It gave Heather an undreamed-of power: a touch made him shudder. Her touch. She touched him again and he moaned. He showed her the strength in her own tongue. He showed her the reason her breasts were so soft. He showed her the way in which words could actually sound like themselves: moist, friction, thrust. His voice in her hair could make her cry out. The sweet coffee in his mouth shot its sweetness down between her legs.
And he loved her, obviously. He didn't have to do these things for her, after all. He didn't have to drive her home, or take her by the Stop & Shop if she needed something, waiting outside where he could be seen by everyone. He didn't have to hold her by the roadside before she stepped out of his car, out of the world of light, and tell her—unnecessarily, as it happened, because he had told her before—that she was beautiful. Married people seldom had as much, at least the ones Heather could see. She began to look at them now, these paired-off people, in the supermarket or the sports center, or flashing past in their own cars as Heather drove by with her lover. She saw how marriage hardened the husbands and thickened the wives, how conversation between them became competitive, then punitive, before finally crusting into silence. The couples aged separately, companionable or acrimonious, but ultimately unconnected, like horses yoked together and apart at the same time. If this was marriage, Heather thought, she was not unhappy without it.
Not that it didn't pain her, seeing Sue. She seemed to see Sue everywhere now, like a word you learn the meaning of and then suddenly begin to hear on everyone's lips. This person had been yanked from anonymity and hurled into a state of ubiquity by Ashley's brisk nod in
the parking lot as she climbed in beside him one afternoon, his hushed “My wife's car. Let's go.” Heather watched for it after that, and indeed it seemed to turn up regularly in the early afternoons, because Heather had known Ashley's wife for months, she realized now. At least by sight: a tall figure in a flannel shirt, with one rope-thick blond braid down between her shoulder blades and a liquid gaze that slithered past Heather at the reception desk as Sue walked through to the women's locker room. She came to swim her laps, before the kids appeared for lessons and churned up the water. Heather, who couldn't swim herself, had no way of telling whether Sue was a good swimmer, but she certainly kept at it for a long time, droning up and down her allotted lane, her goggled eyes dreamily examining the ceiling with every other stroke. Even before she had known her for who she was, Heather had envied this person, admiring her strong though inelegant legs, her bright hair, loosened from its braid afterward, stiffened with chlorine. This person who needed nothing from her, who even brought her own towels in a faded UVM gym bag, who barely deviated in her course to flash a membership card at the unremarkable person who sat behind the reception desk.
Now that Heather knew Sue, she saw Sue. She saw her at the Stop & Shop, listlessly tossing groceries into one of the rickety carts, and at the Laundromat, reading
The Boston Globe
as Ashley's clothes were purged of their evidence, and at Tom and Whit's, snapping through the pages of the seed catalogues. Heather herself found it curious that, even in her heightened awareness of Ashley's wife, she bore no special animosity toward this person. That Sue declined to take notice of her was not, in itself, an offense. She was used, after all, to being taken no notice of, and in any case, Sue was a contained kind of person. Where Ashley was gregarious, she seemed to give off a chill of courteous self-sufficiency. She had no family here, Heather reasoned, but then again Ashley hadn't either. They had come together from Burlington, where they'd met as students—not to stay, but for the summer only, so Ashley could work for the builder who'd won the sports center contract.
Heather, amazed, considered the chronology. She would have been a junior in high school, up in Goddard Falls, without a car of her own. She would barely have ventured into town all summer. She had only the sparsest memories of the sports center taking shape on its riverbank at the end of Elm Street, carapace to corpus, with its small army of
bronzing men crawling over it. And yet he had been here, nearby, all along.
Then, when the work ended, he quarreled with the builder. The builder, he said, was a coarse man, and stupid. He did not know how to treat a client. He did not know how to make a building. Ashley began to find clients of his own. The following spring he'd tacked a solarium onto the back of Stephen Trask's ranch—an ugly thing, in his own opinion, but there wasn't much you could do to a ranch that wasn't ugly—and so found his way back to the sports center and a regular, if part-time, salary as handyman.
Heather looked past his shoulder, idly smelling the flannel of his work shirt. She had noted Sue's detergent and begun to use it for her own clothes. She loved to sleep in sheets that smelled of Ashley. The forest darkened earlier and earlier now, and they had to keep the motor running for the warmth. Already the windshield would be matted with leaves by the time they finished, and Heather had a vision of the forest heaving up and covering her, in her pleasure and happiness, to keep her safe with Ashley and him safe with her. But through the leaves, the skeletal fingers of pointing branches remained, awaiting their winter accusations.
She took Ashley's hand from its resting place deep in her own hair, held it to the last of the light, and kissed it. The fine thing—that thing that was not herself, and not him, but a consummation exceeding them both—had begun to thrill her, a ghost of an idea, a quickening of love, a potent and dangerous infusion of delight. Her secret.
Ashley sighed, moved lower, and, as if by clairvoyance, kissed her abdomen. “You're so great,” he said, to it or to her.
“Who?” said Heather, frowning.
He laughed. “Oh, I don't know. What'd you say your name was again?”
“I haven't named her,” Heather said. Then: “I mean, it. But I bet it's a girl.”
The wind found a crack in a window and stole inside. The sheen of sweat between them iced over. Ashley's expression didn't change, but it edged into stone.
“How long?”
She reached down to him, to his face. To her intense relief, he kissed her finger as it went by.
“Two months.”
They were two months old themselves.
Ashley said nothing. From outside, the rumble of the river as it passed them by. Nocturnal things woke up on all sides and spoke their minds. The shadow where his face had been only moments before began to shake from side to side.
“It's all right?” Heather said. “You don't mind?”
“No,” he said. “But it's funny, you know.”
By queer coincidence, his wife was pregnant, too.

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