The Best American Short Stories 2014 (25 page)

I found a teaching job at a small college in New Hampshire and Diane got accepted at the Vermont Culinary Institute. We bought a fixer-upper farmhouse, with a wood stove, a barn, and twenty acres, on a dirt road, equally inconvenient to my school and hers. I put a metal roof on the old henhouse—Diane had always wanted to keep chickens—rototilled our garden patch every spring, and bought a chainsaw and a splitter, as well as a rusty Ford 8N, the pretext being that we needed to keep the fields from growing back to brush. Our neighbor, a man in his seventies, kept the thing going for me; he liked us because I was so helpless and Diane was so pretty. In the spring he and I would work up the next winter's wood together, sharing my splitter and running his buzz saw off the tractor's PTO. I don't know how I did all this while teaching three and three and working on my book; when the old man finally went into a home I started buying cordwood. My parents drove up a couple of times a year, and my father always brought his single-O Martin, the guitar on which he taught me my first chords. He and I would sit around playing the half-dozen finger-picking songs—“Lewis Collins,” “Spike Driver's Moan”—that he'd never cared to get beyond. They seldom stayed more than a day or two. The wood stove didn't keep the guest room warm enough in fall or winter, and my mother got bitten to death by mosquitoes in the summer.

Every July Diane and I threw an outdoor music party and pig roast; she'd cook the whole week before, and her friends from Boston and my friends from New York brought tents and sleeping bags and tried to dance to the ad-hoc bands that formed in the corners of the field behind the house. Paul Thompson always turned up with his mandolin, some good weed, and a younger woman, never the same one twice.

For a few years, he'd drive that summer's woman to catch a bus in White River Junction and stay on until Tuesday or Wednesday. Diane liked him—what woman didn't, at first?—and he was no trouble to have around. He took walks in the woods by himself; he spent hours reading in the hammock on the porch, and didn't mind when we went up to bed and left him downstairs with his weed and his headphones. “A man could die happy up here,” he used to say. He told me he liked hearing the rooster at first light, because it made him feel safe to go back to sleep. When he finally got up, he'd go out to the henhouse, gather eggs, and cook his own breakfast—and clean up afterward. Diane usually picked eggs early in the morning, but she'd leave a couple for him to find. Once, when he'd been out there for what seemed like a long time, I went to check on him, and I saw him through the window, squatting on his hams, his cowboy boots the only part of him touching the floor. He was talking and nodding to himself, or to the hens, who came right up to him as they never did for me. I sneaked back to the house and I don't think he heard me.

But most of the time, Paul wasn't anybody I thought about much, though I know now that he was thinking about me.

 

For whatever reason, I never wanted children. Not a crime against humanity—arguably quite the opposite—but of course this became an issue when Diane turned thirty. That and suspicions about me and my students, which I should have seen coming as well, and about one student in particular. (The wrong one, as it happened.) Diane and I lasted ten years, and after she left I drank myself to sleep every night for a month. Didn't that argue that I wasn't cold-hearted? She's remarried now, has her own catering business, and her older daughter's applying to colleges—better schools than the one where I teach. We're on good enough terms these days that she sends me pictures. At the time of the divorce, though, she held out for money in return for her share in the house, and I had no prospect of a better-paying job. My book,
Cathy's Caliban: Sex, Race, and the Sublime in Wuthering Heights
—a rewrite of my dissertation—got only one notice, in
Victorian Studies
, whose reviewer (from some other no-name college, in Missouri) called it “by turns perverse and pedestrian.” The book got me tenure, since nobody else in the department had published in the past ten years, but only a two-thousand-dollar raise. So I went back to working up my own wood, until—God, must we? Until I was able to sell my father's house.

Diane had already left the last time he came up, the fall after my mother died. He had his Martin with him, as usual, but he didn't feel like playing. Could he leave it with me? The strings felt stiff; maybe I could take it to the guy who worked on my guitar? It didn't feel any different to me, but I told him I'd see if Brad could bring the action down a little. Hell, I thought, he's seventy-eight, his fingers might not be as strong as they used to be. This turned out to be what Harold Bloom might call a weak misreading.

I set the chessboard up on the wooden factory spool Diane and I had used for a coffee table—he mostly kicked my ass—and poured glasses of the Jameson he always brought. While I was considering whether or not to move a rook, he picked up a photo from the table beside the sofa: Diane and I sitting at a café in Barcelona, the one time we went to Europe.

“What are you, running a museum?” he said. “Look, I liked Diane. Your mother had her opinion, fine. Me, I think you were crazy to let her go. But you made your choice, right?”

“You
could
call it that.”

“And you still got all her hair shit in there.” He flipped his thumb in the direction of the bathroom, where Diane had left behind mostly empty bottles of conditioners, moisturizers, and lotions.

“Don't think I don't see what you're up to.”

“What, throw you off your game? You fucked yourself two moves back.” I looked the board over again, then got up and put another couple of logs in the stove.

“What I'd do?” he said. “Find some sucker who wants to be—who'm I trying to think of? Thoreau. Then buy yourself a nice little place where you don't have to do
that
nine months a year. You want to be living like this when you're my age?”

“I seem to recall you couldn't wait to get out of the city.”

“Not to live like a sharecropper. You even get cable up here?”

“We don't have a TV.” I sat down again and took another look at the board.

“Interesting,” he said. “And who's the ‘we'?”

“Yeah, OK. I get it.”

“Anyway, now your mother's gone and I'm staring at trees all day. You could have a life. You meeting anybody?”

I laid my king on its side. “Pop. It's been a month.”

“That's my point.” He looked out the window. “These trees are gonna kill you.”

 

By the time Janna moved in, I'd been living in New Hampshire for longer than I had in the city, though I still wasn't fooling the locals any. You could see another house by then: an A-frame up on the rise catty-corner across the road. Diane and I could have bought that parcel along with the land on this side, but we hadn't been able to come up with the extra ten thousand dollars. I hated to look over there.

Janna worked at Century 21, near my college in the old downtown. Yes, I met her at the bar where I'd started going after classes. She'd gotten her job just by walking in and asking for it, and her boss liked the tricks she'd picked up on some website: putting bowls of lemons and Granny Smith apples on kitchen counters, fanning out copies of
Country Journal
on coffee tables. I thought she was too bright to have ended up here: she had an MA in political science from Tufts. But she said she'd found her place in the world. I suppose I had too.

She told me right from the beginning that she didn't want to be the Second Wife, and she'd put a bumper sticker on her Subaru reading
COPULATE, DON'T POPULATE
.

Her apartment had track lighting, good oriental rugs, and a gas fireplace, but she seemed to feel at home in my house. Aside from repainting the living room—a yellow she said would feel warmer than the white Diane and I had gone with—all she did was move the sofa over to where the armchair had been and find us a pine blanket chest for a coffee table. She was fine with dial-up and no TV—she'd let corporate media waste too much of her time, she said—and she even claimed the rooster didn't wake her, though she refused to go into the henhouse herself. After five years, we still had sex more days than not: I'd made peace with her chubby knees; presumably she'd made peace with my loose belly and my too-small hands.

Janna played guitar—another point in her favor—and we sang together once in a while. I'd back her up on her songs—Ani DiFranco, Michelle Shocked, the Indigo Girls, some of it not as bad as you might think—and she knew “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” and the usual stuff by Emmylou Harris. I tried to teach her a couple of Porter and Dolly songs, though she didn't have much of a range and we could never hit on the right key for her. It was Janna, in fact, who talked me into having the music parties again. She hated to cook, so we'd lay in beer and Jack Daniel's and chips, get pizzas delivered, and tell people to bring whatever. She hung back most of the time and let the bluegrass guys do their inside-baseball thing—
Yeah, “Rank Strangers.” Who's gonna do Ralph's part?
—but late at night I could sometimes get her to step into a circle of pickers and sing “Sin City.”

“We could probably make this work,” she'd told me when we'd been together for a month. “If neither of us turns into an asshole.”

“How likely is that?” I said.

“Well,” she said, “if people aren't willing to change. I mean when things call for it.”

“But you're happy
now
.”

“You would've heard,” she said.

 

When I sent the notice out for the party that last summer—we were having it early, since we were going to Yorkshire in July, to see Brontë country—Paul e-mailed back that he'd taken a buyout from
Newsweek
and was “living on Uneasy Street” but that he'd try to make it. He was working on a book proposal, he said, about mountaintop removal, which would get him some time in eastern Kentucky—where maybe he'd be able to play some music too, if he didn't show up in a car with New York plates.

The Friday night of the party, he rolled into the dooryard just after dark, in a Jeep Wrangler, with a woman at the wheel. She looked to be Janna's age and not quite up to Paul's standards—maybe too much nose and too little chin—but with a slender body and straight, dyed-black hair down to her shoulders. He got out, stretched, and looked off at the hills. “Shee-
it!
” he said to the woman. “Just smell the air. I ever tell you? This is my favorite place in the world.”

“Several times,” she said.

“I want y'all to meet Simone,” he said. He always talked more southern when he was around the music. “My last and best.”

“Until the rest of the ass parade comes around the corner.” She ran a finger down his arm.

“Never happen,” Paul said. He looked even lankier than usual, and when he turned to me I saw dark pouches pulling his eyelids down, exposing red below his eyeballs. “Hey, listen, we gotta do ‘Hit Parade of Love.' But first off—what do you say?” He opened his mandolin case and took out a pipe and a plastic bag of buds.

After one hit, I knew I'd had plenty, and that a beer might help and might not; even Paul stopped at three. He kicked off “Hit Parade of Love,” and somehow I found myself singing the first verse, whose words I thought until the last instant wouldn't come to me—
From what I been a-hearin', dear, you really got it made
—but when we got to the chorus, with the tenor part, his voice cracked on the word
top
, and he asked if we could take it down to A. Well, hell, he had to be what, pushing seventy by now? If I was fifty-one?

He gave up before midnight—he said the drive had done him in—and we put him and Simone in the big guest room at the far end of the hall. When the music petered out around two-thirty and people retired to their tents and RVs, Janna and I came upstairs and saw their light was still on; Janna thought she heard him coughing. The rooster woke me for a few seconds as the windows began to show gray; I hoped that if Paul was hearing it too he'd fall back safe asleep.

In the morning I put on one of the knee-length white aprons Diane had left behind, cooked up enough scrambled eggs, along with kale from the garden, to fill the turkey-roasting pan, set out paper plates and plastic forks, and clanged the triangle she'd always used to get the party guests in. Paul and Simone didn't come down until the others were finishing up. “You sleep OK?” I said.

“Never better,” he said. The pouches under his eyes looked darker in daylight. “Once I got my
nightly obligations
taken care of.” He put a hand on Simone's ass and squeezed. “This is the one that's gonna be the death of me.”

“You'll scandalize your friend,” she said. “Look how he's blushing.”

Paul reached down, lifted the hem of my apron, and peeked under. “What's fer breakfast, Maw?”

They took plates out onto the porch, and when I came out after a preliminary cleanup, I found Janna sitting next to him while Simone was on the lawn, trying to get up into a headstand, her black hair splashed out on the grass. He hadn't touched his eggs. “Hey, the Iron Chef,” he said. “Listen, did I tell you I'm playing bass in a rock band? Like one of those daddy bands? I fuckin' love it—we missed so much shit being hillbillies.” He speared a forkful of egg, but set it down. “I might have to quit, though.”

“What's going on with the book?”

“Yeah, well, that too. Story for another time.” Simone had gotten both feet in the air, muscled legs straight, toes pointed, black-polished toenails. Paul clapped his hands and called “Brava!” He turned back to me. “I can't believe I finally got it right,” he said. “In the bottom of the ninth. Check her the fuck out.”