Middle Age (38 page)

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attraction; a sensation she had not felt in months. Until this moment she hadn’t seemed to realize that Rick in his grease-stained coveralls, with singed eyes and skin, was a sexual being; not much younger than Marina; and he took pride in the fact, displaying himself before a woman.

At last the numerals on the gas pump were slowing. Rick said, bemused, as if the subject were altogether natural, “This bad habit I picked up in the Gulf, trying to keep awake for long hours, y’know what guys would do?—rub tobacco on our eyeballs.” He made a gesture as if licking his forefinger, and brought the finger near his eye. Marina winced another time, and Rick laughed, pleased. “Naw, ma’am. I ain’t desperate, I don’t do it
now
.”

At last Marina’s gas tank was full. The amount of purchase was disconcertingly high. Marina paid in bills, and Rick briskly counted out her change, all business now.

Casually he said, “You’re living on Mink Pond, ma’am? The stone house? Used to belong to Mr. Benedict? Pryde hires out to plow driveways, y’know.” Rick explained it was forty dollars each time if arrangements were made beforehand; but if customers waited until they were snowed in, and called, it was fifty dollars. Pryde only plowed out customers if there was a sufficient accumulation, Rick said emphatically, as if there were snow removal services of which this wasn’t true. “We’re careful about that, ma’am. But in an average winter say we plow you out ten times, you’d pay five hundred dollars altogether if you hadn’t made arrangements beforehand, but if you do it’s only four hundred. Plus you won’t find yourself in any emergency situation out in the woods, if you sign up now.”

A pickup truck was pulling in behind Marina at the gas pump.

Quickly she said, “That’s a good idea, Rick. I was going to ask about your snowplow service, my driveway is a half-mile long and difficult to—”

“No, ma’am. It ain’t more than a quarter-mile. But you could get really stuck back there. I’ve seen it happen.” Rick spoke ominously.

So Marina hired Pryde’s snowplowing service to keep her driveway cleared through the winter. She would think of this, in retrospect, as one of her wise, practical decisions, amid others that were neither.

Several nights later, on December , there came the first serious snowfall of the season. Through the overcast blustery day Marina uneasily observed particles of snow swirling past her windows, pinging like bits of sand against the glass, blown against the northern sides of trees; she
Middle Age: A Romance

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prayed her power wouldn’t go out; and in the evening lit a fire in the fireplace, and huddled beside it, a book in her hand, waiting.

But snow ceased falling by midnight, less than three inches accumulated. Pryde’s snowplowing service did not show up.



The fell of dark
.
Not day
. There was the dark-furred cat silhouetted against the snow. Marina stared from her window, as if the creature had called her name.

How brief days were. A patch of lighted cloud surrounded by gigantic storm clouds. Virtually no sun.

“Could mankind imagine a sun, if there’d never been a sun?”

But there was night, so reliable. There was
Night
.

The snow-creature outside her window. Its coat was thicker now with winter, and lustrous. Tufted ears, flattish owl-face, eyes glaring like reflectors.
Marina
.
Marina!

“I must be terribly lonely. These delusions . . .”

Hair in her face as she crouched at the window. Crept like a clumsy animal from the darkened bedroom and into the next room, to another window, crouched at the sill, hoping to follow the big cat as it circled the house. If she made a careless gesture
Night
vanished.

Except: she was wakened from sleep by something making its stealthy way through dead leaves, where they’d been blown up against the house.

Marina left meat scraps for the cat. Though probably raccoons got there first. Behind a curtain she waited to see what creature approached, but none did, not so long as she was watching; yet in the morning the scraps were gone, the aluminum plates tossed rudely aside like trash. And in place of the food was the part-devoured carcass of a rabbit or squirrel.

Mangled bloody flesh-remains the size of a man’s fist; how curious, the heart and inner organs had been removed as if with surgical precision, and left conspicuously in the snow beside the carcass. Sometimes Marina gagged, but always Marina looked.
Night
was leaving these for her.

W     of the drafty old stone house Marina’s things were accumulating.

The moth with wide ragged beautifully marked wings. Skeletons of

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birds delicate as lacework. Buttons prized from the cracks between floorboards. A baby’s wooden rattle, green-glass doll’s eyes. Newsprint smeared in rust-colored patterns like distant constellations. And more, small random
things
of no value that struck Marina’s eye, touched at her heart.

She was a bird making a nest, of materials found close by. She was a pack rat, greedy and ingenious.

In the frigid air of early morning, her breath steaming, Marina took Polaroid shots of the
things
left for her in the snow behind the house.

Bloody mangled fetuses they seemed to her. A mockery of her childless-ness. Ugly, obscene, piteous the suffering of such defenseless creatures, Marina half-shut her eyes yet she was determined to take the photos, for this felt like fate.

The wild cat’s footprints in the snow, amid the blood-trail, these too Marina photographed, in fascination.

Such
things
Marina Troy accumulated through her winter in the old stone house, stark square Polaroid prints on her windowsills, for what purpose?

Night
, Marina was never to photograph.

A    one day while searching for materials for Adam’s sculptures, she discovered a box of mildewed papers.

It was a small cardboard box hidden amid tattered lawn furniture, filthy with cobwebs and mouse droppings. Most of the papers appeared to be badly faded computer printouts of columns of figures. Bank statements? If these belonged to Adam Berendt, there was no identification.

Eventually Marina came upon a name on another document:
Ezra Krane.

Teasingly familiar, but Marina couldn’t remember why. At the top of a printout from
Revenue Canada—Statement of amounts paid or credited to
nonresidents of Canada
—there was another vaguely familiar name,
Samuel
Myers.

Marina continued to rummage through the printed documents, few of them of much interest, until by chance she saw a torn sheet of paper with familiar handwriting on it.

Adam’s handwriting! Marina would recognize it anywhere.

But the name, the signature, was unknown to Marina—

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—repeated in a column covering the page.

Why? Why would Adam sign another’s name?

“Adam? Was ‘Francis Xavier Brady’—
you?
’’

If so, keep the secret.

Who Brady was, where Brady came from, Adam hadn’t wanted us to know.

If you love him keep his secret.

Yes?

Marina tore the paper into shreds. Though she would remember Francis Xavier Brady as keenly as if Adam himself had revealed it to her.

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O    Marina plaited her hair carelessly, wound it around her head headache-tight and secured it with pins and pulled a wool cap low on her forehead. Pale and plain and capable-looking she was, in her trousers, boots, fleece-lined khaki jacket. She liked the relief of being sexless; at first glance she looked like any youngish guy in Damascus County, driving a Jeep. She drove through town and out onto the highway past the Timber Hill Ski Resort where in good weather skiers were visible from the road, flying down the dazzling white slopes fearless of accidents, injury. Marina envied these strangers their courage and their playfulness for it seemed to Marina that life required almost too much courage, and there was no time for play. She was in an anxious mood. She wasn’t making much progress with Adam’s sculptures, and

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why? How badly she wanted to complete them! She’d taped photos of his best work to her walls but these images weren’t inspiring her. She was feeling constrained, intimidated, for under the spell of Adam’s work she could only imitate him, yet of course she couldn’t openly imitate him, that wasn’t at all what she intended.

Adam Berendt’s most successful sculpted pieces were blunt, clumsy-seeming yet to Marina’s eye magical combinations of wildly disparate ele-ments. Scrap metal, wood, plastic, earth tones or transparencies, with abrupt, sometimes jarring touches. These might be whimsical sculptures or they might be starkly beautiful, they might be purposely ugly, disturbing. It had been Adam’s intention to make them appear haphazard, but Marina knew there was nothing haphazard in their creation.

At the Shawnee Scrap Yard, Marina asked the bull-necked owner if she could look around. “My husband is a sculptor and he sends me out for materials,” she said, and the proprietor regarded her with curiosity, saying,

“We don’t have ‘sculpture’ supplies here,” and Marina said, “He doesn’t want supplies, just things. ‘Found’ things. Anything.” The proprietor shrugged and told Marina sure, look around all she wanted. Marina would see the man watching her from his trailer office as she drifted about the yard. She was trying to “see” with Adam’s eyes. She’d had a week of frustrating days but was feeling optimistic now, in the open air.

It was Christmas week. A week of unbridled American optimism.

Though Marina wasn’t celebrating Christmas, and had come to dislike the tyrannical holiday, she felt the Christmas buoyancy in the air. Even the Shawnee Scrap Yard was decorated with ugly flapping tinsel and a shiny red plastic Santa Claus perched on the trailer roof.

“Adam, what looks good? What do you like?”

She selected twisted, discolored pieces of metal from wrecked vehicles.

A cracked headlight, a stained floor mat, a broken stick shift. Badly rusted license plates. Kewpie dolls lewdly dangling from rearview mirrors, stiff with grime. Knobs, handles, mirror fragments. So much broken glass in this world, and much of it mirror fragments. The owner of the yard, who called himself Steve, came outside, to ask Marina if she needed help lug-ging these things to her Jeep and quickly she told the man thanks, but no, she was fine. And she was fine: she’d become strong, in her new arduous life. When she asked the man what she owed him he waved her away.

“Hell, ma’am, it’s just junk. You’re welcome to it.” “But five dollars, at least? Please?” The man frowned, backing off; as if Marina had inadvertently offended him; but she too had been offended by the “ma’am”—it so
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distanced her from the life of this community, set her off as a stranger, worse yet a tourist. She heard herself telling Steve that she and her husband lived close by, on Mink Pond Road north of Damascus Crossing, in an old stone house built in the s; she heard herself asking (but why, why was she doing this!) if he’d ever met her husband Adam Berendt, and the man shook his head, no he didn’t think so. Steve was younger than Adam but had Adam’s stocky build and peely-flaky-burnt-looking skin. “I bet you’ve met him, a few years ago,” Marina said, “he’d have come here, looking for things. ‘Adam Berendt,’ the sculptor.”

“ ‘Berendt’?” Steve frowned as if trying seriously to remember but finally, no, he shook his head. “Guess not, ma’am. Sorry.”

D  then Marina wondered: why would it have mattered so much to her, that the scrap yard owner remember Adam?

“What is happening to me?”

P-C   at the Salthill Bookstore were “pretty good”—“some days bustling, almost”—“not too bad, considering.” (Considering what, Marina wondered.) Molly Ivers cheerfully reported having to keep the store open until seven .., sometimes eight .. But even her cheery voice sounded frayed, like sound piped into the telephone receiver. Marina who’d wished to take the young woman’s enthusiasm for granted felt a stab of dismay.
Are we losing money? Going bankrupt?

The bookstore, like the village of Salthill and its suburban environs, had become remote to Marina, as an anesthetized part of one’s body becomes remote; yet Marina knew, whether she felt pain or not, there might be pain to feel. The damned—“quaint”—bookstore was her livelihood, unless she quickly found another.

“That rude, pushy man who used to come in here asking about you, that lawyer, Cavanagh, I think his name is—he’s stopped coming in.
That’s
good news, Marina, at least!”

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P-C   at Home Depot, Kmart, Wal-Mart, Sears, JCPenney, Discount King . . . Marina drifted through the giant warehouse stores like a ghost among solid fleshy Brueghel figures. Why were

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these Americans so much more real than Marina Troy? And so many of them: pushing shopping carts heaped with merchandise, returning presents, making exciting new purchases at “slashed” prices. Christmas carols were still being piped loudly into stores, the holiday spirit prevailed. In January would come the slack, dead season, but not just yet.

Marina, a home owner, was alert too to bargains. She could not afford to scorn sales. Kitchen appliances slashed by  percent, terrycloth towels in untidy heaps, women’s waterproofed boots slashed by  percent, snow shovels, mousetraps, shower curtains, underwear, television sets, carpet remnants slashed by 6 percent . . .

There must be something I want? Something I need?

Sometimes in the warehouse stores Marina thought she saw individuals she knew. At the far end of a crowded fluorescent-bright aisle there was Beverly Hogan with rouged cheeks and ash-blond hair shiny as a wig.