Curled in the Bed of Love (20 page)

Sometime in the early hours of the morning, Isabelle puts down her wine glass and lies on the sofa and puts her head in his lap. He strokes her hair. She asks him why they never got together when they met years ago.

Marshall had been in love with another ranger. He saw Isabelle only on weekends in Seattle, where she roomed with a mutual friend. “I was with someone then.”

Isabelle laughs. “You weren't married.”

Marshall came close only once. His college girlfriend, Kay, had wanted Marshall to marry her. Even then Marshall had taken very seriously his obligation to be monogamous—had bypassed so many opportunities—but when they graduated and the future so suddenly became the present, he hadn't known how to say yes or no to Kay. She'd gone home to St. Louis to look for a job, and he'd gone out West. They'd written each other love letters, pretended for a year that they were still in a relationship. They never actually decided to break up, just mysteriously crossed the threshold into affection and nostalgia. He was a groomsman at her wedding.

“Well, I really lusted after you,” Isabelle says. “I've always wondered what it would have been like.” She touches his cheek. “Wouldn't you like to find out?”

“Your boyfriend,” Marshall says.

“We're theater people,” she says. “We're loose. As long as you use a condom.”

Their sex is simple, clean, almost like exercise. The bed creaks and groans beneath them for what seems like hours, and their bodies turn slippery with sweat, and they keep at it and keep at it. Marshall thinks that if they'd made love so long ago, the act would have been encumbered by his guilt and Isabelle's indulgence in emotion, would have been only a first step toward trouble. Now it's an uncomplicated mixture of curiosity and hard work. Her breasts
are as firm as he had imagined they would be, small, stippled by goose bumps, and he wants to mouth, again and again, the sweet swoop from her hip bones to the swell of her abdomen, take into himself the answer to his curiosity.

Minus any complicating wants, he feels free to focus entirely on admiring her, as if for the first time, finding in her features, the too-large eyes and mobile mouth, something surpassing the anonymous beauty that would have steered her career in the direction of
TV
and movies. And she returns his admiration as easily. “Jesus Christ, but you're beautiful,” she says. In the mystery of her nakedness he discovers fragments of the past, the innocent way that he and Isabelle used to hold hands. After he slowly and carefully eases out of her body, she kisses his ear and whispers that she knew he'd be like a kid. He lies on his stomach beside her, an arm thrown over her breasts, and falls asleep.

He doesn't wake till noon, long after Isabelle has risen, made coffee, read the paper. Together they make a huge breakfast, and Isabelle piles it all onto one plate and sits in his lap, feeding him toast from her hand, trading bites of scrambled eggs from a single fork. He teases her into going rafting on the Rogue River. Only a degenerate New Yorker could live here and not partake of the wilderness.

But it's a mistake. The cold water sloshing in the bottom of the raft numbs Isabelle's feet, and she's afraid she'll fall out every time they make a run through white water. Marshall can't understand. The need to work each time they hit white water doesn't leave any room to be afraid. Like the work of rock climbing. His brother taught him. When they were rappelling each other up the sheer face of a granite cliff, they could think only of the smallest things, the clink of a hook being clipped to the line, the rocketing scatter of pebbles beneath a misplaced foot, the blisters the braided line rubbed onto their palms. The smallest mistake that either of them
made could cost the other his life, the two lives made one by the line that linked them. When they reached the top, their skin was infused with the rosy afterglow of the climb.

He feels that same exhilaration on the river. But when they finally pull out of the water, Isabelle can't hide the fact that she's had to make herself endure the last four hours. She huddles on the drive home, shivering, but he makes it up to her. He draws a bath for her, peels off her wet clothes that stink of river water, brings her a hot cocoa in the tub, and then massages her legs and numb feet. When she complains that he smells like the river too, he shucks his own clothes and squats in the tub to wash her hair, kneads her scalp till the lather turns creamy, till he can trace rivulets of foam down the taut tendons at the back of her neck and over her sharp narrow shoulders. She turns her face away when he leans to kiss her, but he persists, pulls her into a slickembrace.

They have another two days of perfection, big meals, many bottles of wine, hearty activity in bed that leaves them both aching, walking stiffly. He feels so pleased now by how concrete, how real, the physical consequences of pleasure are. The night before he has to go, when Isabelle is lying in his arms and he can feel sleep tugging at him, he asks her if she'll come with him down the coast. He wants to drive through the redwoods of Northern California on his way down to Santa Cruz.

“I don't like to camp,” Isabelle says.

“That's because you've never tried it.”

“You know I can't,” she says.

He's afraid for a moment that he's ruined everything, marred the wholeness of these days. But then she kisses him tenderly, and this emotion, sweeter than regret, seals their victory over the incompleteness of the past.

All the next day, as he drives west to the coast, he can smell the stench of river mud in the car—from her wet clothes, from her
skin and hair. She's with him, as his brother is with him, his ashes sealed in a tin canister tucked under the seat.

He arrives at Lisa's at dusk. She's still in uniform, a ranger at the Oregon Caves. Lisa lives with her lover, Susan, but when he worked with Lisa at the Olympic National Park, she was often lonely like him. The park staff was such a small and transitory social group that anyone who was single could go months between relationships, and Lisa had the added complication that she was gay—she used to joke that a lesbian who didn't live in a city deserved to be sex deprived. They cemented their friendship by sharing pranks like dirty little secrets—they coated the hall floors of their apartment building with Vaseline in the middle of the night and denied responsibility, sewed sergeant's stripes on the sleeves of their tight-assed boss's uniform. Marshall sometimes slept over with Lisa, who wore a bulky flannel gown that prohibited exploration but enriched their mutual curiosity, made tantalizing the fact that they would never have sex with each other.

He wants Lisa to haul him into her bed again, but Susan regards him with mistrust the moment he steps in the door. She sits with her hand in Lisa's lap while they drink beer, watching them both, eyes narrowed. When Susan gets up to go to bed, she stands in the doorway waiting until Lisa joins her, eyes downcast, and he has to unroll his sleeping bag on their sofa and lie awake all night.

The next day he takes Lisa's tour of the caves, but she is school-marmish and strict about not touching the moist, cool walls of the cave, addresses everyone, including him, as sir or ma'am. At the end of her tour, she refuses to play hooky and explore the woods with him. He goes back to her house, chops a cord of wood for her and Susan, and stacks it neatly on the porch of their cabin. He sweats out the fantasy that he can win Susan over, that when the two women come home, he'll be welcome to share a bed with
both of them. At dusk they return, carrying dinner in a paper sack and a video. At their kitchen table, littered with greasy paper and beer bottles, Susan talks about work the way that he and Lisa used to talk about work, for insiders only. Then Susan puts the video on, and they watch it in silence. In the morning, after the women leave for work, he bakes chocolate chip cookies and leaves a plate of them on the table with a good-bye note.

A few hours after Marshall drives over the state line into California, he sees billboards along the highway: See the Ancient Giants! Redwoods! He feels awe for redwoods, vaulting into the sky the way they vault through time, spanning centuries recorded only as narrow rings in their mighty circumference. He pulls over where the signs direct him and parks. It's a private preserve, with a ticket booth where he hastily hands over money, his mind on getting into the woods, roaming the wilderness. But immediately he realizes he's been conned. A paved path winds past trees that are necklaced by signs bearing cartoon-like animals painted on plywood. Approaching a tree, he comes within hearing range of the tape-recorded message that plays from a small metal box staked into the ground beside the path. A saccharine voice exudes enthusiasm about the tree and tells him the name it's been given. The tiny grove buzzes with the gnat-like sound of these recordings.

He imagines the path will continue past this odious Disneyland, and then he'll really be in the woods. He hurries on down the path, forced to follow its circuitous route past the numbered and named and disgraced trees until he's stopped by a chain-link fence. He turns back, intending to march straight out of here. But he's halted at tree eleven, stopped by the blurry mechanical voice coming from the box. He listens. A voice he's already begun to forget speaks to him from the box.

His brother tells him a story he knows well, about a time Marshall's never been able to remember, when he was four and his
brother was six. Their mother was outside hanging laundry on the clothesline, and Marshall fell on the basement steps and cut his knee. His brother's voice falters, puzzled. “I guess because we were little, it seemed like she was far away. I couldn't go get her. You were bleeding. I had to be the man in charge. I knew you were supposed to put something on a cut to clean it, so I ran up to the kitchen and got the can of Comet from under the sink and came back and sprinkled it on your cut. It must have stung like hell. Jesus, Marshall, your face when you looked at me.”

The tape plays over and over, his brother telling Marshall the same story. Marshall counts 128 words. In the sinking dimness of the coming dusk, Marshall sees the silhouette of his brother cut against an expanse of sky as he stands atop the cliff they've climbed, triumphant.

Debi lives in Mendocino, a coastal California town about the size of Ashland that's been gentrified by tourists and people rich enough to buy second homes, to patronize expensive small restaurants wedged onto the flanks of the coastal mountains. On his first night, Debi wants to take Marshall to one of these restaurants, but he doesn't have the right clothes. His entire wardrobe is packed in his car, and he has nothing but flannel shirts, jeans, and hiking boots to wear. The suit he bought for his brother's funeral—shopping with his parents at Nordstrom the day before the funeral, politely declining the sales clerk's offer to have the suit tailored and ready by the end of the week—hangs in a closet in his parents' house.

Debi calls him “Mountain Man” and fishes from her closet a pair of khaki pants and an oxford shirt that belong to some other man whom she doesn't name. Ordinarily, on principle, he'd refuse to dress for a meal, but somehow he's silenced by the painstaking order of Debi's closet, the carefully gauged comfort of her wood, glass, and tile house, its spaces artfully constructed so that each room on the main floor is open to the others.

She orders for them at the restaurant, and he's quite willing to let her order food he's never heard of—a salad of mesclun, a local wine, stuffed squab, and after dinner, alembic brandy. She makes fun of the pretentious menu, but she orders with the careless familiarity of someone who's been doing this all her life.

It makes him wonder about her. Because she was Kay's roommate, Marshall never thought about Debi much beyond the stability of her company, never felt curious about her the way he did about so many other women. Back then, Marshall thought of Debi as ordinary. She had—still has—a head of tight blond curls, used to study till late every night because she was premed, seemed unafflicted by the compulsion to experiment that preoccupied Marshall's other friends. He doesn't even remember her compact body, so expensively shown off tonight in a black silk dress. As she tells him in her careless, abbreviated way about last winter's trip to Switzerland and her yearly two-week jaunt as a medical volunteer in Central America, he realizes she must have grown up well-off, was probably never so ordinary and self-effacing as he remembers.

When they return to her house, Debi sits out on the deck to smoke, tipping ashes into a metal pail filled with sand.

“I hate the smell of smoke in the house,” she says. “I hate for people to find out. I'm a doctor, after all, always riding other people about their bad habits.”

“You'd think you'd just quit.”

Debi smiles and shrugs.

Marshall had hoped for some answer. It's a dirty habit, one that rightfully ought to accrue shame, secretiveness. “But it's not like you,” he says. “It's irrational.”

“I'm counting on medical science to keep advancing. By the time I'm old enough to have to pay the piper, maybe a lung transplant will be a piece of cake. Geneticists are already talking about harvesting cells from newborns and cloning them. They can fuse the cell nucleus with an unfertilized egg so they can extract stem
cells—cells that haven't yet specialized. They'll be able to refrigerate them for years until you need a new organ. Then they can just grow you a new liver or lung from your own private stock. Maybe we'll all finally have a crackat immortality.”

“One-stop organ shopping,” Marshall says.

“It's a happy thought,” Debi says. “Never having to pay for your mistakes.”

It's like her—the woman he remembers—to be so narrow, to think only of what can be anticipated. But this is just one way death can come. There are so many other ways, like the vicious collapse of metal that pierced and crushed his brother's body.