Off Course (11 page)

Cress marveled at Sylvia's use of
we
and
our
. “I love pie.”

“Stop by! The next time you're in Sparkville. I'll buy you a slice.”

At the bar, in his leather outfit and battered hat, Quinn leaned on one elbow and surveyed the room like a lone gunslinger, new to town.

“His work has been so slow,” Sylvia said softly. “I've helped out, I really have, even if he won't admit it. He's embarrassed he can't carry us. It's not his fault nobody's building. If I was smart like you, I'd go to nursing school or get a teaching credential, but I can't take tests. I get too nervous, and my hand shakes too much to write. Even the driver's test. I like Harvey's. I hope you come in.”

Cress promised: on her next run to town, she'd stop by for pie.

Quinn came toward them with two brimming draft beers, one Coke.

“I can't drink,” Sylvia said. “My Indian blood. Half a beer puts me out.”

“Half a beer, we'll be pulling her up from under the table,” said Quinn.

The buffet opened and they filled their plates with pork chops and sauerkraut. After they finished eating, Cress refused a ride home and stayed to hear Donna sing.

*   *   *

He'd stolen Sylvia from a letterman, a linebacker, a senior—when he was a lowly sophomore, no less. He'd wooed her away—better care, he said, had done the trick. Her mom had just died, and her dad, a Nez Perce Indian, was sweet when sober, but a nasty drunk. So Quinn moved Sylvia in with his family, where she stayed even as he went to U.C.L.A. and lived in the dorms. They married over Christmas break his freshman year. It was too late to get into married-student housing so Quinn left school then, after that one quarter, thinking that he'd make some money so they could rent a little place together near campus. “But that spring all of us, the whole family, moved up to the mountains for good.” His parents lived on the property; he and Sylvia rented a little house on Sand Creek Road. He worked with his father and brother, often down south.

Quinn and Cress were wending their way through a manzanita thicket, the round little leaves beaded with fat drops of snowmelt. Quinn batted them as they walked, sending bright sprays into the air. Cress had to hang back or be soaked.

“You never went back to college?”

“I took night courses. Sparkville Community College. Still do. Spanish. Welding. Shakespeare. Structural engineering.”

“Ever take an econ course?”

“Should I?”

“I'm the wrong person to ask.”

*   *   *

“Now, you tell me something,” he said. “I talk too much around you. It's your turn.”

She told him how she'd lost momentum in Pasadena, working crappy jobs and hanging out with friends at Braithway Court. How she'd come here hoping to get work done.

“But then you made all new friends.” He turned and cocked an eyebrow:
Am I right?
“You'd make friends wherever you go.”

They turned east and crossed Spearmint Creek, and stayed on the fire road so they could walk abreast as they talked.

She'd tell him something else, too, she said, but he couldn't use it against her. It would sound like a rationalization, and maybe it was. Her father thought so. But she'd come to hate economics. She'd stopped believing in it, she'd lost her faith. She now considered economics a pseudoscience, much closer to theology than to math.

He wasn't a bad listener. He slowed and frowned—in concentration, she was fairly sure, not disapproval.

“All economists, Keynesian or libertarian,” she went on, “believe that the market economy works like a machine powered by self-interest. They believe it can be diagrammed and understood mathematically. But that's so demonstratively not true! It's more like a huge, sensitive, infinitely complex organic system subject to many more influences and interferences than self-interest alone. Of course, saying this in grad school is like announcing you're an atheist in a seminary!

“And God! The endless mathematical elaborations bored me to tears. I thought I could go through the charade, jump through all the hoops—take my orals, complete my classwork—and then work on something that actually interested me for my dissertation. I thought if I figured out how artists' work accrues value, it might help some of them shape their careers. But the whole subject was too squishy, and I had to limit limit limit myself until I was tracking just a small set of artists who were all pretty similar. I put so much time and work into research! Or rather, in trying to boil the subject down to something I
could
research. I spent two years just getting a handle on my topic. In the end, what I'm trying to write is so different from what I wanted to do, I don't have the heart, or whatever, to get it done. I had to ignore so much reality to seem at all systematic. To get any kind of model. And that's what most economists do—ignore everything that doesn't fit their model, whatever doesn't function as part of a machine. I don't know. Maybe I picked the wrong subject. Art! Artists! What was I thinking? Why didn't my advisor stop me? It's way too late to start over. And I don't want to be that pathetic never-finished-her-dissertation person. But even that, the prospect of being a pathetic All-but-Disser doesn't inspire me.

“I know,” Cress pushed on before Quinn could respond. “I should just shut up and do it. Jump through the hoops, like my advisor says, so I can mount my critique from the inside.”

“Or just decide you're never going to write it, and that's fine,” said Quinn. “Then move on to the next thing.”

“Yeah, but what's the next thing?”

“Don't you want to draw or paint?”

“I'm a Sunday sketcher, at best. Even I know I'm not talented enough to make a living at it.”

Sadly, the only field she'd shown a talent for was econ, and even that was thanks to her growing up with a traumatized victim of the Great Depression. Her father's fears and obsessions had imprinted her with thought patterns that, superficially at least, were indistinguishable from the mind-set of a trained economist: What is given up to get this? What is the true cost? Whose self-interest is going to prevail? What are the margins, the hidden costs?

Back in college, she'd relished the prospect of achievement in a largely male arena. Lady economists were scarce, scary. Even her father would be intimidated.

But the men—her classmates—wore her down, she told Quinn. She won fellowships—some, perhaps, through affirmative action. And she published far more than anyone else in her class. Her essays, which she submitted to quarterlies and journals under the name C. A. Hartley, were praised in peer review for their clarity and readability, the writing. She was the first woman to edit
The Midwest Economic Review
, a coveted job among the graduate students; she chose articles and wrote the monthly editorials. Except for John Bird, not one of her male classmates congratulated her or acknowledged any of her triumphs. They ignored her, excluded her. Luckily, in her first year, there was one other woman in the program, Joan, a thirty-seven-year-old actress who was planning a second career in academia. Cress and Joan had huddled together while the men in their program formed study groups, went drinking, ate meals en masse, and threw parties without ever inviting them. She and Joan had their own study group of two, their own long nights of talking and drinking. At the end of their first year, Joan quit. “If I wanted to be around so much sexism,” she told Cress, “I would've stayed in Hollywood.”

In Cress's second year, she and John Bird were assigned a project together and started dating, which somewhat lessened her isolation.

“If I had the least talent,” Cress told Quinn, “I'd be a landscape painter. I'd love to look hard at the natural world all day and make my feeble facsimile. It's such a noble, old-fashioned profession, like writing novels. But it's a lot harder than it looks. And totally out of vogue.”

“I'll tell you what's out of vogue,” said Quinn. “Fine architectural woodworking is out of vogue. Nobody wants boiserie or inlay or sculptural ornament. I haven't had a decent job in eight, ten months now, and the last one was just a tiny plinth for the Getty.”

“You've had a bad year,” Cress said.

He turned with such a look of shock and anger, she stepped backward, stumbled. “I mean, with your dad and all,” she said.

His anger receded. “I guess that's right.”

She wanted to put her hand flat on his shoulder blade to soothe and reassure him, but didn't dare, out here when they were alone. She wouldn't want him to get the wrong idea. The bright, chiming sound of water running over rocks in Spearmint Creek filled the silence.

He stopped short, pointing to a scrap of red plastic embedded in the dirt. He crouched and dug out a Swiss Army knife. “Lookee here,” he said. “This represents real money. Just lying on the ground.”

He rubbed the pocketknife on his jeans, and gave it to her. In the red plastic, a tiny, smiling, thick-lipped fish was inlaid in steel. The toothpick was still in its slot. “You got to pay me for it,” he said. “Or it's bad luck.”

“Bad luck, how?”

“Give a knife, sever a friendship,” he said.

She dug in her jeans pocket, handed over a nickel.

 

Nine

The Morrow brothers camped beside the Rodinger house in an older white travel trailer with a thick aqua stripe and, high up at the back, a pair of small, flat, useless yellow wings. Inside was an entire miniature home—kitchen, dining room, bedroom—paneled in yellowing teak. Cress, Don Dare, and the brothers played hearts at the tiny dinette, whose table and benches folded down nightly into Caleb's bed. (“Quinn gets the master suite.” Caleb pointed to a platform in the rear of the trailer where a sleeping bag curled on a bare foam pad.)

Cress was winning. They called her
the smart one
,
the little cardsharp in the corner there
, and
the doctor
, but they didn't seem to mind her victory—unlike her Econ colleagues, who had taken her successes as personal affronts. The Morrow brothers made sure she had a drink, a pillow behind her. She felt happy, petted.

The brothers glowered and clucked over their cards. “Hate to send a boy out to do a man's work,” Quinn said, playing a jack of diamonds.

Caleb dropped a two of diamonds on the trick. “And that's all she wrote.” He raised an eyebrow her way, as if they shared a secret. He was droll with that elastic, hound-dog face. The more she was around him, the less ugly he was. She hoped his wife was smart. At least she was a laugher, if a loud one.

Quinn scooped up the next trick. “That's what I get for bringing a knife to a gunfight.”

Caleb stood and said he was going out to have a look at the stars. Quinn called after him, “Fifty feet, please.” When Cress got up to use the bathroom a few minutes later, they shooed her away from the tiny one inside the trailer (“You don't even want to
look
in there,” said Caleb) and sent her out of doors, with Quinn calling, “Fifty feet, please.”

Caleb said, “This morning I'm making coffee and who's looking in at me but some white-muzzled old bear.”

“That's my guy!” said Cress. “But why isn't he asleep?”

Quinn said, “Sierra bears don't go into a true hibernation. It's not really cold enough. They get up and snack.”

Caleb made popcorn and they opened more beer. A wind came up and shook the little trailer, but they were snug inside. At midnight, she and Don clambered down the steps and both brothers, silhouetted, waved from the door.

*   *   *

“Pop bid a remodel at that house seven, eight years ago.” Quinn waved at one of Reggie Thornton's ranch-style log homes. “The kitchen was a dark, airless cubbyhole they wanted to open up. That was my one time at the Meadows before now. Pop came in at something like twice the nearest bid—he was never ever the lowest. Of course, he was worth every cent. But not everybody wants a work of art for a kitchen. Or can afford one. Nobody did work like Pop.”

“You must miss him,” said Cress.

“When I don't wish I'd killed him with my own bare hands,” said Quinn. “Ah, Pop”—this with soft bitterness—“such an artist and such an infant. Completely irresponsible.”

“You're an artist too.”

“Oh no. I'm just a craftsman, thank God.”

But Caleb, Quinn said, took after the old man. Every project, those two had to go through the whole agonizing creative process, A to Z, starting from scratch; never wanting to repeat, they lived in fear that the new job was too much like the old job. If the client had paid them for an original design, they wanted it to be entirely original, from the ground up. Then, at a certain point, they became afraid that they'd gone too far afield from the last job, the one that the client had admired. Each step of the way involved torture and self-doubt, the smallest thing that went wrong became a major crisis. “Though they usually made something even more imaginative and unusual from their mistakes,” said Quinn. “I wish I could show you; their work was so clever and funny—if you think cabinets can be funny—little stowaway places for lids and bowls. Handles in the shapes of bones and pomegranates. One in-and-out china cupboard they built, you filled the shelves from the kitchen and pulled the plates out in the dining room—just a lovely, one-of-a-kind thing … but the amount of moaning and self-doubt, and the
naps
!”

Whenever something went wrong, his father hit the ground snoring. The owner would come home and there was his carpenter, asleep on the kitchen rug. Whether it was a famous producer's private theater on Mulholland Drive or some housewife in Sparkville having Sears cabinets installed, his father went at the job like it was the Sistine Chapel. “Me, I go in, build the kitchen, the home theater, the bookshelf, and move on,” Quinn said. “Someone in this family had to get the job done. They got the talent, I got the clipboard.”