The Remedy for Love: A Novel (10 page)

Eighteen

THE HEMLOCKS ALONG
the buried stairway down to the water were just overgrown enough that he could grasp branches on both sides of the way and let himself down and down toward the water’s edge through the snowdrift, no footing at all in the cheap rain boots. The snow was still falling, blowing, dumping off branches, accumulating fast on his shoulders, his hatless head. He wished for rope, but there’d been none in the shed, all that junk and boating stuff and no rope, not even a ski rope, not even a clothesline, stuff you’d just expect to find in a place like that. But the depth of the drift kept him upright, the smelly old coat warm as a sleeping bag. He refused to pull the hood up.

He’d never seen so much snow on the ground, much less in one storm, and no let-up, the snow coming just as it had all night. The river below him was a black coursing, the only other life in all the stillness, the ice at its edges growing into architectural filigrees and ferns, ironwork wrought in glass, reaching hands of ice eventually to meet and cover the river. He thought of Danielle falling in, pictured her struggling back to the cabin, her ankle already swelling. Duty. That was the feeling that surged in his breast, that and no other.

His feet kept skating out from under him on the buried stairs, but the branches and the steadying depth of the snow made the trick seem possible. Danielle had provided her heavily spiked and grommeted belt, whipping it right off her bedizened skinny jeans, brief shot of her narrow hips in the process: underfed, but. But the clothes—once they’d been nice. Those pants hung. He’d looped the belt through the handle of one of her joint-compound buckets, five gallons. If he could scoop just two and a half gallons, that would weigh about twenty pounds, manageable, maybe even a kind of ballast to help him keep his footing as he climbed back up. He wore his leather dress gloves—the fish-scaling gloves were just too soaked—thought about where he’d go to buy new ones when this was all over: trip down to Portland. Alison liked to shop. She’d know right where to go. And after maybe they could get a bite.

Incrementally, like an astronaut venturing away from his lunar lander, he made his way down, shoulder pulsing dully. The last hemlock branch was thick enough and long enough to get him to the river’s edge, those soft hemlock needles in his face, fresh snow blowing down his neck. He’d never seen Alison’s condo in Portland, much less stayed over. He kicked at the drift, opened a passage, took one last step, gingerly kicked out a platform he could stand on, never letting go of the branch. The river was actually shallow here and calm, a slack eddy, very clear, grasses under there showing the slight upriver flow, no rocks. So, Danielle had invented the rocks, lied about how her injury happened, weird chick. The current seemed a vestige of summer, the long river grasses like thick, luxuriant hair, bright green and lively, healthy, shining, tumbling, perilous. Alison never wore a belt, didn’t need one.

He renewed his grip on the tree branch, his dress gloves giving surprisingly supple purchase, and leaned carefully, dangled the bucket by means of Danielle’s belt, dipped it successfully, watched it fill, found he couldn’t lift it: that shoulder. He shifted his footing, changed hands, gripped the hemlock branch, but the only position he could manage was just too awkward—he couldn’t even collect half a bucket. And now the thing was sinking past his reach, and nothing he could do to stop it. He held on a while, but in the end he had to drop the tongue of Danielle’s belt. The bucket sat squarely on the shallow bottom, flooded to just above its rim, belt trailing in the current, hopeless.

He said nothing on his return, just stood by the fire. Danielle was sewing at the kitchen table—mending her torn underpants, of all projects, not a word from her, either, chubby antique needle cushion at her elbow, more of the cabin’s strange largesse. He could tell she’d just sat down, that she’d watched every move of his expedition through the shrinking lens of the front window. Good of her not to complain about the belt. She’d been down there in better conditions and knew how bad it was. If he couldn’t solve the problem and deliver the big gallons they’d have to go back to melting snow, like maybe a quart of water or two an hour when what she needed for drinking and cooking and fire safety and cleanliness (and to get rid of him) was many gallons, plus a margin.

Once his hands were warm and his face had thawed, back to the shed. Under the simple workbench he’d seen a length of garden hose that conceivably could be tied around the hemlock trunk at one end and his waist at the other, give him two hands to work with. There was the garden hoe, too, which he might be able to hook through the handle of the bucket and in the process rescue Danielle’s belt.

He warmed the hose by the stove to soften it, tied it around his waist over the big coat, carried the rest in a coil in front of him with one arm, the hoe with the other, like Don Quixote going to battle, or maybe like an ensign in an ROTC hazing. The path through the unbelievably deep snow had gotten pretty well traveled, so a little relief there, though new snow filled his footsteps even as he worked. He passed the whole coil of hose around the lowest hemlock trunk, rolled the coil down the slope and started after it, a garden-hose belay, the leather gloves perfectly grippy if not perfectly warm. The knot in his stomach loosened with each foot of progress: things were going better than he’d expected. He made the river’s edge easily, sat back in the huge snowdrift, which was as soft and supportive as a lounge chair. From that position, using the hoe and all his strength, he was able to retrieve bucket and belt and maybe three gallons of water. After a rest, he plunked the bucket in the drift ahead, pulled himself hand by hand up the hose one step at a time, moving the bucket forward as he went. He stole quick glances at the big window, gratified to see Danielle up there watching him intently through the whale’s eye.

In the cabin he ignored her unreadable gaze as best he could, moved the old copper slipper tub close to the stove, dumped his gallons in, like nothing in the huge vessel, a few inches at the bottom. But there by the stove the water would be convenient for her cooking and warmer for any bathing she might manage—straight out of the river it wasn’t more than thirty-five degrees! And then another trip, plodding. And then another. And another.

By the time the copper slipper was two-thirds full (probably twenty gallons of water in there, two more solid hours of hard work), the operation had got pretty workaday, except for his hands, which were more and more painfully chapped and frozen, and his shoulder, miserable. One last trip and he filled up all the pots on the stove, including an old lobster kettle that held some three gallons. Twenty minutes boiling and she could drink it without worries. One last-last trip and he brought the five-gallon bucket back mostly full. He was done, water to last through whatever disasters awaited her.

“Mister,” Danielle said.

Just the one word, but he knew by the tone of her voice that the subject of his leaving had been dropped. He’d been arguing his case in his head all the while: no one could make it up that hill through these drifts without snowshoes. Also, he’d exhausted himself on her behalf.

“Really,” she said.

“I won’t so much as touch the ladder tonight,” he said.

“Perfect gentleman,” she said again. She seemed to intensely dislike the concept: “Perfect, perfect. Gentleman, lovely gentleman.”

“Now
you
sound like Joan Baez.”

“She dated Bob Dylan. They weren’t for each other, mister. My grandmother hated him for that.”

Done-in, sweated, he pulled his chair away from the stove, out of her orbit, clear over to the table with his puzzle, sat heavily on the crunching cushions, sorted pieces of sky.

Not long and he felt himself nodding, caught himself with a jerk, sat up. Danielle was well into cooking something, or anyway chopping furiously at a pile of carrots on the butcher’s block, one of the bigger pots he’d filled bubbling merrily all of a sudden. He nodded off again, woke shivering, his naked feet up on the coffee table amid his puzzle pieces and plain freezing wind, the interior drift growing, an elegant tentacle. Danielle was talking to someone. Stealthily, he turned to see: secret cell phone?

But no, she was holding a photograph, must have climbed the ladder to retrieve it, and yes, she was speaking to the thing, murmuring and muttering, like Hamlet speaking to Yorick’s skull, if Yorick’s skull had been an 8x10 print. Which made Eric into an 8x10 Horatio, alas, guy half frozen in a graveyard, barely a role at all, listening in on a private soliloquy, passionate tones. He didn’t want to bother her, but he needed to get near the stove, needed to get there immediately. He stood, chair legs bugling on the floorboards, so much for subtlety.

She cried out as if caught at something, seemed to assume he’d been listening, rushed to explain: “I’d been about to break it off! That very night. Eric. I was going to say, ‘Let’s just pull back a little here, Jimmy LaRoque.’ ”

“Okay,” Eric said gently. He tripped to the stove, all the pots of water he’d filled boiling, even the big kettle—he’d been asleep for quite a while, it seemed.

She gazed back upon the photo, kept up the monologue, but as if she’d been talking to Eric all along: “I mean, he was about to deploy, seemed like a good time, let me get back to school, let me get away from him, not to see anyone else, not like that, but to see no one, pull back, that’s all, take the pillow off my face. Then we had like six weeks and what we pulled back was the fucking trigger, all the way back, a wedding with his insane family and then a honeymoon, at least without them, at the Samoset in Rockland, constant lobsters, which I don’t love. It’s all at the airport now, the way they do it—
’Bye Honey, hope you don’t die
—and he’s off to advanced elite Ranger training, and then we get a weekend, which was severely off, like lobster sex instead of lobsters and sex. And then he’s off to base in Afghanistan, two months of letters and e-mails and general slobber, phone calls every week. And then silence. Because his unit headed into Pakistan, as I’m not supposed to know.”

Eric zipped his lips for her, wan gesture. His shoulder had all but seized. He wheeled his arm to stretch it. She joined him at the stove, one notch too close, briefly showed him the photo—a cheerful young man in shiny high health beaming at the photographer, full Ranger camo regalia, two long rifles crossed in front of him, ammo belts crossed on his chest, black service beret drooping spookily over one eye. He had a weak chin but strong cheekbones, deep-set eyes, a guy who hadn’t slept and didn’t care, definitely trouble.

Eric said, “He’s incredibly handsome.”

“Not really,” said Danielle. She gazed at the photo a little longer, finally put it down on the butcher’s block, retrieved Eric’s socks, crisply dry, and then surprised him by bending to help him get them on. She even put his dried dress loafers on the floor side by side, where he could step into them like a school kid on the way out the door for the bus.

“Get your chair,” she said. “Let’s sit right here for lunch.”

Her cheer made him suspicious, but not in a way he could say. He put a log in the fire, also a split of kindling to keep it hot, made the instant calculation that their wood wouldn’t last, not even till nightfall, not at the rate they were burning it. But they had to burn it like that: the wind was beginning to pick up again, the snow coming harder again, whumps on the roof from all the burdened hemlocks and from the great twin pines high above.

He brought his chair to the stove, not too close to hers.

And shortly she placed a steaming bowl of ramen noodles in his hands, uneven chunks of carrot sunk in there unpeeled but healthily orange at least, spoon already in, its handle sliding along the edge of the bowl till it hit his thumb with a hot splash. “Thanks,” he said.

“Three packets,” she said.

“The carrots are pretty,” he said.

“Oh!” she said, seeming to notice them for the first time. She served herself and sat.

Sodium. Was that the only food group anymore? The noodles were hard to capture with the spoon but they were hot and they were good enough. “Great idea with the carrots,” he said.

And they ate, slurping and sighing.

Nineteen

WITH THE INDISPENSABLE
hoe, Eric dug around the woodshed drift till he located the rest of the logs he’d cut, gradually levered them free using his feet and the hoe’s long handle. After maybe half an hour of hard labor he had them all inside the cabin, small diameter logs from the top of the tree he’d brought down, enough wood to guarantee the night and the next morning, anyway, and that would have to be the end. No way Danielle was ever going to be able to stay the winter here, if that was her plan, no way she could spend another day. He rolled the carpet up and out of the way, and started in cutting with the bow saw, using the arm of the couch as a horse, his crumpled sports jacket as padding to protect the furniture. He rested after each cut, rubbed the kisses on his shoulder, gazed at the sky around Lichtenstein Castle, as far as he’d gotten, tried to find a piece to fit with just his eyes.

He pushed Lieutenant James LaRoque back down into his head as far as he could, all the way down into his toes, his toes inside the rain boots. Something about those crossed rifles, the winning smile, the weak chin, the exhausted, intelligent eyes. In the photo Jimmy looked like a good enough guy, someone you’d want on your team, manly and foursquare, someone you’d want taking care of business for you in Afghanistan or anywhere else, someone who deserved the best from everyone back home, someone who’d expect his wife to be cared for when necessary, and cared for honorably, in sickness and in health.

Danielle in her Rasta cap and huge sweater, Danielle in her filthy jeans, Danielle half catatonic, then tidying the kitchen area, Danielle frozen again, then looking at Jimmy’s photo and muttering, then suddenly washing the lunch dishes with a rag. She seemed barely to register Eric. Her limp had increased, he noticed. She groaned audibly climbing the ladder to the sleeping loft. No doubt she was terribly hungover, too. He’d been the one to work it off. No doubt the morning’s mercurial cheer had had to do with the wine still in her system. Of course.

Eric realized he’d been composing e-mails in his head all day, no whining and carrying on, just pleasant e-mails telling Alison what he was up to, this unexpected adventure he found himself on: helping the homeless squared. For the hundredth time he reached in his pocket for his phone—an urge to know the time, not to call anyone or check for messages, he told himself—but of course there was no phone, and no time either, not really, and no one: Danielle was right.

He sawed logs, and it got increasingly difficult as he went along, the muscles of his arms burning with the effort, fangs in his shoulder, exhaustion setting in. After their hookup in Beacon Hill, that first intimate sojourn, Alison holding all the cards, she came to Maine for a long weekend, one of the fall holidays. Not Labor Day. Later than that. She must have had Columbus Day off. You could look up the date in 2004, get it precisely right. If you had your phone. The seeds of their later disagreements were already in place. That, he could see clearly in hindsight: their first contiguous days together as a couple and constant small arguments over the minutest factual things, never personal, angry dissections, too, of very slight political divergences, these two people who deeply agreed on everything getting as hot over the details of their orthodoxy as the old protestant pastors, nuanced positions breaking the church of their romance into splinters and then splinters of splinters, sharp things to be deployed at any time.

He thought of the fact of churches for a while, and the way people must always form exclusionary claques, a long conversation with himself, aimed at a kind of vague jury, one of his habits of mind—constant, considered argument. A deflection, of course.

Back to Alison. The incremental sexual disengagement, one less sigh here, one less favor there. Her face came to him just briefly, her face very happy on vacation somewhere. Brazil. She had a warm, open, freckled face, brown bangs that aspired to blonde, a broad mouth and a ready smile that she’d deploy whether praising or eviscerating, very hard to know the difference till late in the middle of the night when you thought back over what she’d said. Her cleavage was freckled, too, structured by a variety of expensive bras.

She’d moved to Woodchurch after their wedding. They’d found a partner’s desk at a high-end antiques dealer, and his parents had bought it for them. They’d rented a building with an option to buy—Alison refused to live where she worked—and the desk filled the conference room. They kept busy, then busier. She was a gadfly down at the capitol and brought in mountains of state work. Across from one another at the enormous desk, they put in long days, then longer. And the truth was, it was fun. She had an ingenious way in court, which was to attribute the weaknesses of their own client’s case to the opponent’s client. So if there weren’t enough evidence that such and such a big company was off-dumping chemicals into a scenic river (she always called every river scenic), or evidence to tie the presence of those chemicals in the scenic river to the company, she would stand at the witness box and say, in so many words: You’ve got no evidence, no paperwork, no taped conversations, no chain of events that prove you
didn’t
dump those chemicals in that scenic river, that public treasure. No evidence of any kind. Who did you expect to believe you? Not this court! The logic didn’t matter, and neither did the objections, always sustained: Alison had a way of prevailing. And she brought in clients. Their two years working at that desk were their two most successful. After that, she took the job in Augusta.

Their sex life, which had never exactly sizzled (and Eric knew sizzle: Iskra), fizzled, to use the language of a women’s magazine he’d seen at the dentist’s office. A teaser had caught his interest, and waiting for a filling he’d read the ten ways to put that sizzle back. He knew flowers had no effect on Alison, and he knew that lingerie wasn’t going to work—she was a flannel girl. He did offer a massage, item seven, which she accepted (the first he’d seen her naked in weeks), accepted and napped through, waking only to slap his hand when he reached too high inside her leg. And he made her dinner, also breakfast, items nine and ten respectively.

Talk of children didn’t move her, not at all: she was not going to have a pack of stainers get in the way of a career. Stainers, that was her word! And since procreation was what sex was ultimately about, what was the point of pursuing it? Pleasure? Pleasure you could get from a meal! She’d been raised to expect the best in all things, and she studied the gap between her expectations and the reality of their lives with close attention. You have low libido, she said to him as they ate sometimes, you are bored by sex, you shut me out: but that was her jury-trial strategy. You never knew she was doing it till later, when it was too late to argue, too late to reverse the verdict.

Really, there wasn’t enough wood. Eric cleared the way back outside—the snow falling so fast and dumping off the steep roof so continually that the doorway was already blocked again—bashed his way back beneath the underskirts of the hemlocks. In the near-dark and relative silence under there he collected dead-dry sticks and handfuls of fine twigs as high up into the trees as he could painfully reach, unwilling to venture back up the hill for anything more substantial. He made bundles of fuel, passed them out of the relative quiet and into the storm. The wind had definitely gathered force, seemed to come from a new direction. The hemlocks drooped and swayed. The two mighty white pine trees creaked and groaned overhead, flung twigs and bundles of needles. Another hour passed like nothing, or ten minutes, who could tell, except that the overcast got darker and then darker again, dusk coming, exercise endorphins coursing through him like whatever caused love, but darkened by adrenaline: something in him ready to fight.

The house was warm. He brought his bundles in two at a time.

Danielle was up, stood by the stove glowering, moody thing.

Eric patted his pockets, just a quick message he wanted to type into his phone, quick note to Alison, laughed at himself when he remembered.

“Merry fucking elf,” Danielle said.