Fever (5 page)

But I had not walked far before I came to see the hopelessness of loving him again. I was married to another man whom I also loved. I had no wish to hurt Gary by leaving him and anyway, (I found myself using a crisp, legal-sounding language even in my head), an apology from Lucas did not constitute a desire to renew our relationship.

Eventually I went back home to Gary who had made a pot of coffee and was sitting at the kitchen table drinking it while he waited patiently for my return. I handed him the creased and wrinkled letter and waited while he read it. When he had finished, he stood and got the coffee pot and filled the cup he had already set in my place.

“Well,” he said in his quiet way, unsmiling, “how about that.”

That night I lay awake tossing in the darkness, one moment filled with tenderness for Lucas and the next angry that a few words scratched on a piece of paper could make me forget the anguish, the misery of those years. All the scenes of his cruelty came flooding over me: Lucas entering the house at breakfast after being out all night, the kids, Karen especially, rushing off to school as soon as he entered the kitchen; me walking into a friend’s house unannounced for coffee and finding him there; him disappearing from a party with a woman so that I had to catch a ride home with the next-door neighbours.

Finally I got out of bed and went to sit in the living room. I didn’t turn on the lights, but sat in the big chair by the window and stared out across the blackness of the river at the myriad steady lights shining above the wide, soft shadow I knew to be trees. The night Lucas left me: coming into the house after
midnight when I was alone reading in our bed, the kids asleep in their rooms, not speaking to me as he tossed his clothes into suitcases, his friend who was driving him (he was leaving me even the car), coughing gently as he waited in the hall, me sitting helpless in my nightgown, smelling the musky scent of the marijuana he had been smoking, not realizing for years that the marijuana wasn’t another insult aimed at me, but his way of gathering his courage to come and make the final break.

No, I said to him in my head, I don’t forgive you. Some things are not forgivable.

Gary came to find me then, took me back to bed with him, and I at last fell asleep curled up against his warm back.

What does he think he did that was wrong? I had pondered, walking slowly up and down those winding paths. What was his conception of his sin? Was I to forgive him for the women? For his casual and deliberate insults and the way he so often shamed me? Was it for taking my love and abusing it? Was it all of these, or only some, or something else I hadn’t remembered or thought of? I found I could not imagine for what he was asking forgiveness.

I wrote him a reply. His letter had seemed genuine and I couldn’t bring myself to let him suffer anymore. I forgive you, I wrote. It wasn’t all your fault, and I told him how I used to think there was no such thing as justice, that justice was an artificial, man-made and childish concept that had no place in the history or psychology of humankind. I wrote, I guess I was wrong and I have you to thank for that, but then I crossed that last line out and scribbled over it so he couldn’t read it, and thought with pleasure how he would puzzle over it and try to decipher what I had written and then decided I didn’t want him to see.

I had even thought, walking up and down those paths, that I would say to him in reply, your apology is too late, I forgave you
long ago, but that seemed cruel, a trivializing of his anguish which I believed to be real.

But now I see that words like justice and forgiveness have nothing to do with anything, they are only words. I see now that whatever happened between Lucas and me was only life, and while neither of us will ever know why it happened, I know now that neither will I ever recover, as I had always expected to, from what it did to me. Nor, I suppose, will Lucas. If you are in an accident with your new car and are hurt, no matter how well you heal or how much time passes, you always have twinges to remind you of what happened, and though you may get the car’s motor running again, and its body hammered smooth and freshly painted, it is never quite a new car again.

Janet and her friend, Livie, and Livie’s boyfriend, Nathan, get out of Nathan’s car and then stand uncertainly, listening to the faint laughter and occasional muted shriek coming from the darkness on the far side of the parking lot, across the space that must be grass, between them and the tall black pines whose uppermost silhouette they can see hard against the starry, luminous sky. “No moon tonight,” Livie says.

“The dark of the moon,” Janet says softly, and shivers. The summer night is cool at this altitude, out here on the edge of the forest.

“Can’t see a goddam thing,” Nathan says. “Well, let’s strike out. They aren’t going to come for us.” Crickets, or is it frogs, are singing loudly and steadily with an immediacy that the human voices don’t have. The three of them stumble across the gravelled parking lot behind the row of parked cars, trying to find their way in the dark. When they reach the slowly rising sweep of grass—they hear it against their sandals and feel it on their bare ankles—they suddenly see firelight not so far ahead, just inside the forest’s edge. It flickers and glows between the straight black trunks of the lodgepole pines. There must be a clearing ahead. It’s
been so dry up here that open fires are forbidden except where the park attendants have dug pits and circled them with rocks.

“Those stars are incredible,” Janet says. The others don’t answer her, which doesn’t surprise her, she’s used to that, and Nathan walks straight into a metal barbecue stand that the park people have fixed in cement in the grass.

“Uh!” he says. “Damn!” The bottles in the case of beer he is carrying rattle alarmingly. He backs up and feels his way around the stand.

“Oh, look,” Livie says, excited now. “There’s Brian and Annie.”

“Did you think we had the wrong party?” Nathan asks her, amused, but they are all walking faster now toward the bonfire which has grown larger as they near it and the people standing or sitting around it with bottles in their hands, their faces rosy with firelight.

“In this blackness we could still have the wrong party,” Janet says, “and none of us would ever know.” Her voice rises lightly at the end, but neither Livie nor Nathan pay any attention to her.

“Hey, somebody’s coming,” a voice ahead of them says, and a few people turn to peer into the darkness through which Janet, Livie, and Nathan are walking. Then they are in the circle of dancing light, saying hi, exchanging the case of beer for three opened bottles.

“How come you’re so late?” Brian asks, one hand thrust into his trousers’ pocket, the other holding a beer bottle that is wet from the tub of melting ice that must be sitting somewhere nearby.

“I had to work till eleven,” Livie says.

“Where’s the food?” Nathan asks. “I skipped dinner. I’m starving.” Brian points behind them, deeper into the woods, past a cluster of pines.

“Back there.”

There is an awkward moment for Janet and Livie when Brian turns back to the people he’d been talking to and Nathan leaves them to circle the fire and squat, talking, beside somebody he knows. They are still looking around, trying to adjust to the scene, but everywhere people seem to be locked into conversations. The couple on their right who have been talking quietly, their faces close together, begin to kiss, and laughter breaks out among some others they can’t see, who are standing far back in the forest.

“Come on, Janet,” Livie says. “Let’s go over to where they’re cooking.” They circle the fire in the path between its radiance and heat and the cool darkness of the night, behind the backs of the people who stand or sit facing the fire. Janet doesn’t know anybody here. They walk a few feet through absolute black toward the metal barbecue stands on the other side of a ring of huge pines and find another group of people, all men this time, standing together talking, occasionally reaching out with their long-handled forks to turn pieces of meat which are cooking on the barbecues in front of them.

“Hey, Livie,” a man says, sounding pleased to see her. She moves around the barbecue to hug him and he bends to brush her cheek with his lips. “Glad you could make it,” he says, holding his fork lightly in both hands, balancing it.

“I had to work late,” she says. “It smells terrific.”

“I figured that,” he says. “Won’t be much longer till we can eat.” He turns his head to look questioningly at Janet who still stands on the other side of the barbecue.

“Oh,” Livie says. “I’m sorry. This is my friend, Janet. I talked her into coming with us tonight. Janet, this is …” But a conversation next to them which suddenly grows louder, drowns out her voice so that Janet hears only his last name, which is Baker.

“Hi, Baker,” she says, and when he grins at her, interested
because she has unexpectedly called him by only his last name, she sees how the glow from the charcoal fire in front of him—even through the smoke that drifts upward from the cooking meat—makes his eyes glint. She moves around the barbecue toward him.

A woman is calling Livie, at first she doesn’t appear to hear, then, without speaking again, Livie turns and goes through the night toward the voice.

“Look at the stars,” Janet says to Baker. “Just look.” He lifts his head and looks. They stand together staring up, while the meat beside them drips juices which hit the hot charcoal and sizzle. High up, above the pines which are unexpectedly, gently swaying at their black, mysterious tops sixty or so feet above them, in the vast distance beyond that, there are the stars, shining with a pure, brilliant light, a hard brilliance that takes Janet’s breath away. She almost falls, and puts her hand out on Baker’s arm, apparently to steady herself, but really because she is afraid.

She feels the wrinkled softness of his shirt and his hard, warm forearm under that, and amazingly, he sets the fork down, draws her to him, and holds her against him with both his arms around her, his head still raised to the stars.

Janet is on top of Baker, leaning over him so that her long, dark hair sweeps along his chest. She’s laughing. Tonight there is some moonlight which the curtains can’t fully shut out and she can see how his eyes and teeth gleam as he looks up at her, smiling. She lets herself fall gently toward him till their chests meet. She puts her arms under his neck and her mouth next to his ear.

“For some reason I keep thinking of this movie I saw. ‘Heartbreaker'? Did you ever see it?”

“I don’t think so,” Baker says. His hands are on her waist, resting there gently. He slides them down over the curve of her hips and then up to hold her rib cage tenderly between his palms.

“Peter Coyote and Nick Mancuso, or something. They’re these best friends in New York. Peter Coyote is an artist and he has this model.” Baker begins to turn his hips slowly to the right. She realizes he wants her to turn so they can lie on their sides facing each other. She knows he isn’t really listening, but this doesn’t silence her. Even as she turns with him, sliding her leg down by his longer one, she is thinking of how to tell him the next part in an interesting way.

“And his model is really a nice girl, but she’s a call girl, too. And she loves him, the artist. But he doesn’t love her.” She pauses a moment. Baker has found her mouth and is kissing her so that she can’t speak. It’s almost as if he is trying to stop her from talking. “So one night the two friends and the model wind up in bed together. You know how things like that can … happen …” She pauses, knowing that for a second, at least he is listening.

“Yeah,” he says, his husky voice rising attentively.

Encouraged, Janet goes on. “And then, later, she sees all these artists and people around him and she’s really sad, and she says, ‘I know I’m not interesting or smart. The only interesting thing about me is my chest.’ She has these big breasts, you see.”

“Are you just about finished this story?” Baker interrupts to ask, but he’s laughing and he takes a handful of her long hair and gives it a teasing tug. Janet kisses his mouth, then whispers, “And then she says, ‘The other night?’ “ She kisses his forehead. “'You loved being inside me …’ “ She kisses his chin, and she knows by how still he is that he’s listening again. She remembers how the actress spoke, her intonation, the pain-filled way she turned her head away from the artist to deliver her next line. “ ‘You’re a heartbreaker,’ she says.”

Janet waits. Baker says nothing. “I don’t know why I keep thinking of that.” Or maybe he hasn’t been listening. “It was a good movie,” she says.

He rolls over so that he is on top of her, spreading her legs with his, and puts his mouth, hard, over hers.

“Who was that?” Janet asks. She never, not in a million years, meant to ask him that question, but the look on his face as he returns from the living room where he has been talking on the phone so takes her by surprise that the question is out before she quite realizes she has spoken.

“My wife,” he says. Janet stops chopping the celery, the quick, hard crack against the chopping board ceasing abruptly, then beginning again. “My ex-wife,” he amends, opening the cupboard where he keeps his pots and pans.

“I didn’t know you’d been married,” Janet says.

“Yeah, two kids.” He sets a glass casserole on the stove beside him.

“Does she live here? In the city?” She tries to sound casual, and, in fact, succeeds.

“No,” he says, “in Vancouver. She married again. She phones sometimes about the kids.”

“Should I chop the almonds?” Janet asks. Sometimes, when they are together in his apartment the phone will ring and he will talk a little longer than is polite. Somehow she always knows when the caller is a woman. Is it his manner then?

“I bought slivered almonds,” he says. “Bad form, I know.” They smile at each other in a playful way, suddenly intimate again, and a little shiver runs down Janet’s back.

“I’ve never been married,” she says, leaning on the cupboard
still holding the knife, watching him as he works. “I wish I had been.”

“Hah!” he says. “Don’t wish that.”

“Why not?” she asks, teasing, setting down her knife. He is working with the chicken now, stripping the skin off the pieces and setting it in a pile to one side.

“Because,” he says slowly. “Because it’s … pretty hard, to be married.”

Janet reflects on this, on the way he has spoken so carefully without looking at her, keeping his voice light, stripped of emotion, which reveals to her all too clearly, how deeply he feels, although about precisely what, she doesn’t know. He glances at her then, and smiles again. “Time to put it all together,” he says, stretching out his hands to take the celery, and now he speaks in an entirely different voice, the one she is used to hearing.

“So,” Livie says. “You’ve been getting it on with my friend Baker.” Her voice borders on unfriendliness, so that Janet looks up from her salad and studies Livie cautiously, who doesn’t look up from hers. Janet can’t think what to say to Livie in response. Yes?

“I like him a lot,” she says, finally. “I think he’s a nice man.” She eats a little salad. “How are things with you and Nathan?” This seems like a strange thing for her to say, and she can’t think why she did, except because of that funny tone in Livie’s voice.

“Yeah, he’s a nice man,” Livie says. “Nathan and I’ll probably get married one of these days.” When Janet looks up, surprised, smiling at her, Livie adds hastily, “Well, it’s no big deal. We’ve been living together for almost a year. You know that. And we’ve both been married before, so it isn’t exactly first love.”

“I suppose,” Janet agrees after a minute. For some reason she finds herself feeling like crying. Livie suddenly relents, or else the emotion that Janet has sensed her to be full of today, ever since they sat down to eat, can’t be contained any longer.

“I … we’ll get along fine. We really care for each other,” Livie says, “and I … he … he’s a nice man.” The two women smile tentatively at each other, although Janet is thinking that Livie had meant to say something else.

“A nice man,” Janet says, and laughs. “Well, he is,” she says.

“Nathan or Baker?” Livie asks in a careful tone. She is looking at her salad again, and Janet can’t figure out what’s the matter with her.

“Both of them,” she says, shrugging, not smiling now. “Nathan for sure,” Livie says. “Baker, not so sure.” But she refuses to explain or elaborate when Janet questions her.

“I think you must have had an affair with Livie,” Janet says to Baker. They are driving somewhere in Baker’s old car through the late fall evening, and Janet thinks that now and then she can smell the old dead leaves, like smoke drifting through the silent air.

“Didn’t you know that?” Baker says, surprised. “No,” Janet says.

“I took it for granted she would have told you. Don’t women always tell each other things like that.”

“Yes,” Janet says, and sighs. She cannot imagine why it is whenever she gets news she’d rather not hear that her whole insides go dead. Her bowels feel as if they have turned to cement, her stomach loses all hope of sensation, and she feels as if she will be forever unable to rise from wherever she is sitting. “But she didn’t tell me. I … just … figured it out.”

“Clever,” Baker says. His voice has changed again. That lightness she has heard every once in a while is back, his unconscious way of hiding what he is really thinking, which, of course, reveals to her that he is upset. Angry? Sad over the loss of Livie? Or is it something else? What else could it be?

“Are you angry with me for mentioning it?” she asks him, finally.

“No,” he says. “You have a right to ask.” “I don’t think I asked you,” she says.

“It felt like a question to me,” he says. Janet watches the steady place ahead of them where the road meets the night sky. Now her hands, resting palms up on her lap, feel dead, too. She forces herself to turn her hands over so that her palms are touching the warm wool of her skirt and don’t feel so unprotected, bruised even, by the air in the car.

They arrive at the house they have been travelling toward. The hostess, opening the door, glances swiftly at Janet, whom she has never seen before, then her eyes move to Baker, she breaks into a smile and reaches up to receive his hug. Janet is reminded of the way he hugged Livie in the park months before.