Off Course (24 page)

Dalia came up beside her by the dance floor. “See that big kid with the butch cut?” She nodded to a likely linebacker, a pale, thick teen clearly raised on tube biscuits and grease gravy.

“Good dancer,” Cress said, for despite his bulk and self-satisfied smirk, the boy moved nimbly, even delicately.

“See her?” prodded Dalia. His partner was a buoyant, curly-maned girl who pranced and swiveled in patent-leather kitten heels. She made little come-hither motions with her hands, then scram-scram ones; she tossed her masses of hair and tottered away, only to mince backward and collapse laughing in her partner's arms.

“Cute,” Cress said.

“That's your girl.”

“Mine?” Then a comic sternness in the girl's brow recalled a broader, manlier brow, and the bright mischief in her eyes was altogether familiar. Annette. And Cress began to love.

*   *   *

“I told her,” Quinn said in a low rasp.

Clutching the extension at the end of its spiraling cord in the dim hallway outside of her bedroom, Cress sat on the carpet. “Where are you now?”

“My mom's. I've moved out. We're getting divorced.”

“You okay?”

“Not so much.”

“You want me to come up? You want to come down?”

“You're sweet. I can't right now.”

Cress said, “Sylvia took it hard.”

“No idea it was coming.” Sylvia knew he'd been unhappy, he said. But not that unhappy. And not unhappy with her.

“You didn't tell her about me.”

“It's not about you.”

“Good,” she said.

It was weird, he said. He'd been so mad at Sylvia for so long, about so much, but now that he'd finally had it out with her, he couldn't recall what had made him so furious. He had some weird kind of amnesia. Or he was in shock.

(He shouldn't be telling me this, Cress thought. But she didn't stop him. She needed to hear whatever he might say in order to gauge her own position and relative safety.) He knew he wanted out of the marriage; he'd wanted out for months. Years, honestly. But he couldn't remember why. He was exhausted. His mind and emotions had shut down.

He didn't remember that Sylvia bored him? That she'd failed to console him after his father's terrible death? That twenty years of anxiety and timidity had worn him down until his last tie to her was pity, and even that pity had lost its grip, like old glue that dried and flaked away? Cress would not remind him, of course. It was not her place to remind him.

He didn't seem to remember that he loved her, either.

“I need a few days,” he said. “To take it all in.”

“Yes, yes.” Cress got to her feet. “Of course you do. Take your time.”

“We'll talk. When the coast clears a little.”

Cress beelined past the large fiancés lounging in the living room. Outside, by the Hapsaw, in the warm humid dusk, she shivered as if cold. A soiled white mist crept upstream. She was frightened to think that she'd caused pain—even if Quinn hadn't named her. What if Sylvia did something drastic? Cress imagined her sprawled facedown on that shiny, baby-blue bedspread, dark curls fanned over a pillow.

Cress shuddered and looked around. The ever-trundling Hapsaw was a midsized roil of muddy water with suds along its banks. Crabgrass choked Donna's lawn, and lawns up and down the riverbanks. Even the towering, white-armed sycamore appeared lopsided and ungainly, devoid of enchantment.

*   *   *

In the morning, he had to see her. It was urgent. He missed her. No, he didn't need more time to think things through. He was sick of thinking. He needed to see her warm, wide-open face, feel her smooth long fingers on his skin, smell her hair, which always reminded him of sleeping in the grass in the sun. He should be suffering alone, he knew, yes, yes, in exile; spiraling down to some essential truth about himself and his marriage, but he just couldn't bear to be away from her.

It was Saturday, and Cress was working the 320-person Franklin–Gillette wedding reception, whose setup started at noon; the meal, toasts, and dancing would last deep into evening; she probably couldn't meet him till sometime after ten, and only then if Dalia let her off before the very end.

He'd been drinking when she got to the Staghorn. He looked ashen, walloped, ill. She nosed his neck; his hair felt damp and hot underneath, he'd bathed and perfumed himself for her. His body quaked as she held him. “Nobody is making you do this,” she whispered. “You don't have to go through with it. I'll be fine no matter what.” She meant to soothe, to remove pressure; never mind if, for the moment, she exaggerated her own emotional capacities.

They hurried to Donna's house, to the tiny close gray room where they could speak only in the lowest whispers. He yanked her clothes off, gasping and determined, and they made love in desperate silence. Yes, it was as always, their great comfort and relief. His color returned, he stroked her face, looked long into her eyes. On the other side of the thin wall, Norma and Ike debated between prime rib and baron of beef for their wedding dinner. Surf and turf—excitement amplified Norma's voice—was only a dollar twenty more per person. See? On the list? Murmuring, and then, “No, Ike, we
need
the cobbler. Wedding cake doesn't count as dessert.”

*   *   *

In the morning Cress was carrying two cups of coffee down the hall when Norma emerged from her room in her white terry-cloth robe. “Morning,” Cress said softly. The robe brushed past, flattening Cress against the wall. Coffee slopped on her bare foot.

She and Quinn huddled in bed with their mugs, gazing at the blank white closet doors. “I'll talk to Annette this week,” he said. “She'll know, of course. She's home with her mom. I really want her to meet you. Down the line.”

“In due time,” Cress said.

“Evan will be the hardest,” said Quinn. “I'll have to be very careful how I tell him so he doesn't take it on himself.”

She touched his hip under the covers. They both felt ill, feverish, here, mid-gauntlet, the numinous months on the mountain behind them, the future a blur. They were together right now, in bed, naked, the coffee strong and delicious: weren't these the very components of their previous bliss? Would these elements ever again coalesce into happiness?

*   *   *

Cress was grateful, later, for the mindless setting up and taking down of banquets. The waitresses unfolded heavy pipe-legged tables, arranged, clothed, and set them; they hauled out the parquet dance floor in plywood-sized pieces. Because Cress had a “good eye,” Dalia assigned her boxing and skirting duties, which meant she created virginal, linen-wrapped head tables, gift tables, tables for the cake, for champagne-glass pyramids.

A few weeks of weddings had made the waitresses into experts and brutal, mocking critics. “Not another mauve-and-ice-blue color scheme!” one of them would cry across the hall as they set up. “Not another peach wedding!”

“Should I ever marry again, my color scheme will be plaid,” declared one waitress. Lisette, the head waitress, claimed polka dots; another waitress gingham. Cress said, “Maybe I'll have a striped wedding—or make that a leather wedding— No! no! not black leather, you pervs. More like a tanned-hide wedding … Oh shut up, everyone!” They uniformly disdained dyed carnations and any silk flowers; Cress alone defended a red rose, pine bough, and pinecone centerpiece. They were ruthless on wedding dresses and anything-but-black on groomsmen. “More powder-blue poufters!” a waitress sang into the break room to announce the arrival of yet another wedding party.

*   *   *

Cress drove home at midnight, her shift drink sweating between her knees in a waxy, twenty-ounce to-go cup. When she awoke, her tiny room was humid and cloyed with the evaporate of undrunk bourbon.

Between her lunch and evening shifts, Cress sat in the sun in Donna's backyard. The river had clarified and darkened; the low tones in its juicy passage resonated with the ache in her chest. She'd given up on the semi-porn novel. Her mind clicked and calculated. She was not a cost-effective choice for Quinn. He'd lose daily access to his children, the house in town, not to mention a wife's beauty and faultless housekeeping. And for what? A broad-faced, homeless All-but-Disser with a bank account in the mid–three figures? (Four hundred and twenty-eight dollars to be exact, thanks to her swap-meet splurges.) Also, Quinn knew she'd lived with boyfriends; he knew—in the vaguest way—that she'd dated Jakey. Having had Sylvia exclusively to himself might mean more to him than he realized. His generation put a premium on that sort of thing, while hers considered virginity and, to some extent, the monogamous impulse itself, a liability.

*   *   *

He phoned her midday as she fed the lady golfers. Dalia let her take the call in her office, for privacy. Annette had been sweet, he said. She, too, had said,
Whatever makes you happy, Daddy.
Also,
If you don't love Mom anymore, you don't love her—and I hope you find someone you do
.

“I love you, Cress,” he said. “I wish this part was over.”

*   *   *

Sylvia was the hitch. Sylvia was why this part wasn't over. Sylvia was suffering. He hadn't been able to talk to her yet about the next steps: hiring lawyers, dividing accounts. She was weeping all the time, and calling in sick to work. Perhaps she was too timid and fragile to survive on her own.

“She managed well enough when Quinn was on the mountain,” Donna said. “And why would she want to stay married to him? If I was her, I'd wash my hands of him. Once guys start tomcatting, it's a hard habit to break.”

Cress was grateful that Donna had reminded her: Sylvia had a job. She worked, she could support herself. She'd be fine. She'd get the house, and alimony. She'd remarry, too. Men liked her: a fox.

Then Annette announced that she would put off college for a year and stay at home to see her mother through this patch. For both of them to leave at once, Annette told Quinn, was too hard on her mom. No big deal, Annette said, really. She'd take classes at Sparkville Community College, get a job. Of course, Quinn forbade Annette to do this, although how he planned to prevent her—Annette was eighteen now and free to do as she pleased—he didn't say. He was also proud, Cress could see, of his daughter's generosity.

Cress did not want Sylvia to be miserable. But Sylvia should accept reality. Quinn was unhappy, and had been for years. Did Sylvia expect him to stay around just to keep her unhappiness at bay?

Cress worried, of course, that Sylvia might commit suicide. How had Quinn put it? The meanest thing a person can do to someone else.

*   *   *

Sylvia didn't kill herself. On a tip, she asked her daughter's pale, burly boyfriend to drive her to the Staghorn, where Quinn's truck and Cress's Saab mingled openly in the parking lot. The boyfriend peered inside, reported back. Sylvia directed him then to Corky Ned's Liquor Stop by the lake, where, being too distraught to go inside, she sent him in for a flat pint of whiskey, which he purchased with his fake ID. Back at the Staghorn, they parked around on the side, passed the flat warm bottle, and waited. In half an hour, they caravanned unseen behind Quinn and Cress to Donna's house. Sylvia was slipping out from under her seat belt by then, and so the boyfriend drove her home.

The next morning, Sylvia awoke and drove herself through woolly Thule fog, visibility thirty feet, the ten miles back to Donna's house, where Quinn's truck was still parked. She wasn't surprised, she'd told Quinn. On some level, she'd known all along.

“I'm sorry. She had a real bad night,” Cress whispered into the phone at the Petrocchi–Evans reception. “I know you wanted to keep me out of it.”

“That's because you are not the cause,” said Quinn. “Our marriage has been dead for a long time.”

“Does Sylvia agree that it's dead?”

“She had no idea I felt that way. Which tells you how little she knows me. How little she noticed.”

Men, Cress knew, sometimes said that their marriage was dead when their wives lost interest in making love. Mustering her courage, she asked.

“No, no. That was always the one good thing between us,” Quinn said. “I never got tired of her that way.”

*   *   *

Cress had her lady golfers on Monday, and a small dinner for the Old Duffers, a seniors-only male golf club that night. By the time she walked into the Staghorn to meet Quinn, it was ten o'clock. She was the only woman in the room. Men, mostly older, clumped around the small wobbly tables, and a few more sat scattered along the bar. She took a stool at the far end, near the sink, where the bartender, who knew her now, could run interference should she need it. No, he said, Quinn had not been in yet. She ordered a beer and sipped it, and after ten minutes, she took out a scrap of paper and, to appear occupied, pretended to write a shopping list.
Coffee, pork chops, razors, heroin, hanging rope
. The bartender set down another beer even as she still had most of her first. “He says hello, is all,” he said, when she tried to refuse it. Her benefactor—white-haired, sixty-ish, handsome—saluted her with a finger to his curly eyebrow. She slid off her stool. Let Quinn find her at Donna's; he could tap on her window or pitch a handful of gravel.

But he never did tap or pitch and it was her turn for a sleepless night. The streetlight cast its chilly violet glare through the thin curtain. She forbade herself to get back into the Saab. She wasn't a person who drove all over in the middle of the night to spy on her boyfriend and his wife, even if an effort was required not to be that person; even if speeding down dark highways was far more alluring than tossing and turning in this airless clutterbox of a room.

In the morning, the phone rang, and Norma hit the receiver against her hollow-core door, three short, rude raps.