Torch (39 page)

“What rule?”

He reached out and undid the zipper of her jeans. “The rule about not sleeping with my tenants.”

“I thought we were housemates,” she said coquettishly, and pulled her shirt over her head and stepped out of her jeans and stood before him in her bra and underwear. He looked at her earnestly, as if he were truly pained by the sight of her, as if he hadn’t been rolling around with her in a bed simulating sex only a few hours before. They grabbed onto each other and kissed while she removed his clothes.

“I have a condom,” he whispered after several minutes. They were lying on the mattress by then, which still sat on the floor near the boxes she hadn’t had time to unpack. She watched Andre as he found his shorts on the floor and took his wallet from them and extricated the condom. When he ripped it open, she laughed raucously, as if she were drunk.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, rolling the condom on.

“Nothing,” she said, and laughed again. The feeling she had for him now was the same as the feeling she’d had all day. It was not so much sexual as it was good-natured, and not so much good-natured as it was unavoidable, as if their connection was nothing more than that of two children who’d been introduced and then forced into the backyard to play.

“I don’t usually do this,” he said, hovering over her. She kissed him again and then rolled over onto her stomach and he pushed into her. She felt a searing half happiness while her chin rubbed rhythmically against the blanket, though another part of her traveled ahead to the next day. How she would hide in her room until she was sure Andre had left the house, empty and depressed and remorseful as she tried to make sense of her boxes of things.

Andre came with a moan and then momentarily collapsed on top of her.

“Do you want me to make you come?” he asked, his breath so close to her ear that she shuddered. She twisted around and saw the edge of his face, phantomlike and girlish in the pale streetlights that streamed in through the windows.

“I came,” she lied, and squirmed out from beneath him. She wandered around the room finding her clothes, putting them on piece by piece while he lay on the mattress. She tried to seem carefree and dignified, sexy and bright as she dressed, in case he was watching her, but then she saw that he’d fallen asleep.

“Andre,” she whispered. “Andre,” she said more loudly, so he stirred, but made no reply. “You have to go.” She went to a desk lamp that sat on the floor in the corner and switched it on.

“Huh?” He sat up, disoriented by the light, as if he’d only now realized they were together in her room.

“I can’t sleep if you’re here,” she explained, though she didn’t know what she was talking about. Aside from her dalliance with Bill, she’d never done this before either, gone to bed with someone she’d only just met. For all she knew, she could sleep next to him as well as if she were alone.

He laughed and looked at her like she would take back what she said just because he wanted her to.

“But—that was fun,” she said, so his feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

“Whatever,” he said, and sat up.

The phone rang. She went toward it, to turn down the volume on her machine so whoever it was could leave a message without Andre hearing it, but he picked it up before she could get there.

“Hello?” he trilled in a falsely high female voice. He paused, listening. “Claire? Claire who?”

“
Don’t,
” she whispered fiercely, trying to wrest the phone from him.

“Oh.
Claire
. Well, okay then. Here’s Claire.” He held the phone out to her, a smirk on his face.

“Hello,” she said, turning away from Andre. “What?” she asked. It took her some time to comprehend that it was Lisa, Joshua’s Lisa. She was crying and speaking in nonsensical fragments about Greg Price and Joshua. “Greg!” Claire cried out in her confusion, and then Lisa gathered herself and got it out: Joshua had been arrested and was being held at the jail in Blue River. As she listened, she grabbed her purse and her coat and shoved her feet into her clogs.

“Lisa, hold on. Listen—” she interrupted, “I’m coming. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Tell Josh, okay?” She clicked the phone off and tossed it onto the mattress.

Andre picked it up and placed it back on its receiver. “What’s wrong?” he asked conciliatorily.

“I have to go,” she said, almost panting with panic, leaving the room. She had the feeling he was following her, but she didn’t look back as she descended the dark stairs, her legs shaking from sex and fear.

Once outside, she ran to her car parked on the street. Her hands shook as she jammed the key into the lock and then into the ignition. She gripped the steering wheel firmly to still them as she drove through the streets of Minneapolis, past the apartment where she used to live with David, and then out onto the interstate. On the seat beside her there was a plant she’d forgotten to unload the day before. The edges of its withered leaves tickled her bare arm. She tried to picture Joshua in jail, for what she did not know. In her shock, she had forgotten to ask.
For driving drunk
, she decided, to keep herself from going mad. She wished that she could see his face this instant. The longing for it made her nose tingle and ache.

After a while, it occurred to her that she didn’t know where she was going. As a child, she had taken a field trip to the jail in Blue River, but she didn’t know where, precisely, she should go at this hour in order to get in to see Joshua—by the time she arrived, it would be the middle of
the night. Most likely they would tell her to come back in the morning, and then what would she do? She imagined driving up her old driveway, knocking on the door and waking Bruce up—she supposed, now that it was Kathy’s home, it would be only right to knock—and then she crossed the thought out of her mind as absurd, the notion of going to Bruce at all, even with the news about Joshua. She could go to Lisa, but she didn’t know where Lisa lived—somewhere on the road to the dump is all she knew.

Halfway home, she pulled off the interstate, needing desperately to pee. She parked at a truck stop that was painted to look like a red barn. She had never stopped here in all the times she’d driven by. It was a tourist trap famous, she knew without having ever set foot in the place, for its frosted cinnamon rolls that were as big as your head. She got out of her car and went inside. There was a bin of self-service popcorn by the door and another with stuffed animals of varying shapes and colors and species that you could attempt, one quarter at a time, to capture with a mechanical claw. There were kiosks selling postcards that said “Gateway to the Northland” and “Minnesota Is for Lovers” and rows of shelves selling statuettes of loons and ponies and beavers. There was a counter where you could buy giant soft pretzels and caramel-covered apples and the famous monstrous cinnamon rolls.

Claire ignored these things and made her way toward the women’s room. Inside, she was the only woman in sight, walking along a bright bank of sinks. Several faucets came on without her having touched them, riled by her passing, and then, when she entered a stall, several toilets flushed of their own will. Afterward, standing at the sink washing her hands, she saw herself in the mirror, thin and bluish and exhausted-looking in the fluorescent light, still wearing the rhinestone necklace. She took it off and put it in her purse. She remembered Andre saying
whatever
to her when she had asked him to leave. She didn’t know when she would go back to that house, didn’t know what she would be dealing with once she got to Joshua. It seemed entirely possible to her that Andre was in her room that very minute, rifling through her things. She remembered a little clay gargoyle that David had given her after she’d told him about having been called a gargoyle by a mean boy in the seventh grade. She imagined Andre finding it and holding it up to the light, wondering what it was.

On the way out, she bought a cinnamon roll and carried it out to her
car on a piece of wax paper and set it on her lap, reaching down to tear chunks of it off as she drove north. She’d scarcely eaten anything for days, and now she ate the entire cinnamon roll and could have eaten another. Her mind was a metronome, moving back and forth, but always between the same two things, to Joshua and Joshua. She prayed that he would be okay, that whatever he did would come to nothing, that in the morning they would laugh or argue the way they did with each other about the ridiculous events of the night before.

She took the exit to Midden and her mind emptied out and she drove without thinking, drove like the car was driving itself, racing in the night. She was far enough north now that the trees pressed up close to the sides of the road. Pine trees and birches, poplars and spruce, their silhouettes as familiar to her as people she’d known for years. She could see them in the dark, their shadows looming and kind, watching her the way they had seemed to be watching her all of her life. Their knowing branches reached out to her, knowing, but not telling, knowing but not telling who on this earth she was.

PART V

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

—Raymond Carver,
Late Fragment

T
HE RAIN WAS STILL COMING DOWN
when Bruce left Doug Reed’s place, freezing to slush on the windshield before the blade could clear it away. It was the second week of December and ten inches of snow was on the ground, coated with a thick layer of ice now, shining like glazed porcelain in Bruce’s headlights at five
P.M
.

“Whattya know about them roads?” Leonard asked when Bruce walked into the Lookout. He tossed a cardboard coaster onto the bar in front of him. “You want your regular?”

“Nah, I’ll take a Coke,” he said, though in fact he did want a beer. He’d promised Kathy he wouldn’t until after she’d ovulated and they were in the clear. They had been trying to conceive a baby for six months. Kathy had brought it up the first night they were married, how badly she wanted to have kids, asking him whether he wanted them too. He had answered that he had them already, but Kathy just looked at him with a funny expression.

“
What?
” he asked.

“I’m talking about your own kids,” she persisted.

“They
are
my kids, Kath,” he had said.

“You know what I mean,” she replied.

And he did. An infinitesimal hairline crack of him did. Besides, who was he to stand in the way of Kathy’s dream? They began immediately. Kathy had been keeping records of her cycles for months, tracking her ovulation and menstruation, monitoring her cervical mucus and her luteal surge. Initially, Bruce took this as a sign not so much of her determination as it was a reflection of her profession as a cow inseminator, though he quickly learned that he was wrong. She wept each time she got her period, bitterly remorseful for having waited until she was two weeks shy of her thirty-fifth birthday to even begin to try.

Bruce did what he could. He held her and stroked her hair and reassured her when she cried. He drank tea with her in the evenings called “Fertile Blend.” He took vitamins with zinc and avoided hot baths and had sex with her only missionary style and only on certain days, according to the demands of the chart she kept on the last page of her journal. And at last he even agreed to call her psychic, Gerry, and submit to a reading over the phone. “I sense a presence,” Gerry declared the moment Bruce finished giving him the numbers of his credit card.

“Could it be the baby?” Bruce asked.

“No!” Gerry shouted, changing his mind already. He had a Brooklyn accent, though he lived now in upstate New York. Kathy had met him years before, improbably, at a conference for people who raised and worked with cows. They had been drawn to each other immediately, she had told Bruce, seeing that they were of the same ilk, recognizing each other by their numinous jewelry. He was a small-time guru, holding workshops on occasion in a converted barn on his farm. Kathy had gone there once and camped out in his yard for a week, learning how to read rune stones and tarot cards. She showed Bruce a picture of Gerry she had glued inside her journal. He was a chubby, graying man who looked more like a college professor to Bruce than either a farmer or a psychic, his pink face pocked with old acne scars. “It’s not a presence. Not a person,” he continued with Bruce on the phone. He spoke with agonizing precision, making every few words its own sentence. “It’s an idea. A thought you’re having. It’s getting in the way. It’s blocking the road. There’s a logjam in the river. A mud slide on the path, so to speak.”

“A thought?” asked Bruce, trying to empty his head of everything he knew and believed, not wanting Gerry to divine what was inside, just in case he actually could.

He didn’t believe in psychics or crystals or any of this New Age business, but when they got off the phone, Bruce knew that, in a sense, Gerry had been right. He did have a thought. He had it each time he and Kathy made love during her fertile week, each time she got her period again. It was the thought that when he’d had the idea to marry Kathy, this was not what he expected. He realized now how ignorant and self-absorbed he had been, but Kathy’s desire to have children had taken him completely by surprise, so much was their courtship focused on his grief, his life, his wife and his kids and their loss. Kathy had been his counselor and confidante, his shoulder to cry on. She had been warm and female
and sexually available, expert at drawing him out of his shell, back when the shell he needed to be drawn out of was composed entirely of his eternal love for Teresa Rae Wood.