The Remedy for Love: A Novel (12 page)

“What kind of truck?” Eric said.

But she didn’t get it, that Eric was refusing to rise to the bait, or maybe she did, went back to her reading, quickly absorbed.

Eric had always been in competition with guys like Jim. Stronger, faster, braver, often less intelligent, but handsome as oak trees. And as sensitive. Eric had that going, at least, sensitivity, though Alison was the one who claimed it, narcissist. He tried a little more Thoreau, the anti-Jim if ever there was one, found he could concentrate, began to enjoy Polis again, Thoreau and his Penobscot guide making their way into the forest:

The Indian sat on the front seat, saying nothing to anybody, with a stolid expression of face, as if barely awake to what was going on. Again I was struck by the peculiar vagueness of his replies when addressed in the stage, or at the taverns. He really never said anything on such occasions. He was merely stirred up, like a wild beast, and passively muttered some insignificant response. His answer, in such cases, was never the consequence of a positive mental energy, but vague as a puff of smoke, suggesting no
responsibility,
and if you considered it, you would find that you had got nothing out of him. This was instead of the conventional palaver and smartness of the white man, and equally profitable.

Eric recognized his own style in Polis’s, something Alison with her pop-psychological insights had called passive-aggressive, but which Eric had always merely thought cautious. It was also a great negotiating tool, his slowness at times, his silence after an adversary or interlocutor would say something like, “So, how’s about ten K?” and Eric would sit at the other end of the phone stunned by the generous amount, thinking through all the possible replies, thinking how ten thousand dollars would help his client or how it would help himself or thinking about whatever issue was at hand, thinking and thinking in silence, dead phone till the other person would say: “Okay, twelve.” And still he wouldn’t get the effect of his silence—he’d only realize it maybe the next day—but think and think and feel the pleasure of the extra two thousand till the other person would say, “All right. Fifteen. But that’s the best we can do. Final offer.” And he’d hold a little longer silence, more aware of what he’d achieved, and finally say, “Well. All right. I think we can live with that.”

Here, with Danielle, he’d been talking too much.

She in her quiet reading—still working on the marriage essay, in fact having turned back a page or two to start over, the thorough approach. She scratched at her cheek unconsciously in order to unconsciously signal that she knew he was looking. And he looked back down to his reading, sniffing a little to signal that he hadn’t actually been looking, all this sub rosa communication between everyone always. Eric’s affliction was being aware of it, but the awareness came from his experience interviewing liars and damaged souls and those in trouble, not from anything in his personal life. Or anyway, he had never been able to intuit anything about Alison, ever.

Most get no more than this out of the Indian, and pronounce him stolid accordingly. I was surprised to see what a foolish and impertinent style a Maine man, a passenger, used in addressing him, as if he were a child, which only made his eyes glisten a little. A tipsy Canadian asked him at a tavern, in a drawling tone, if he smoked, to which he answered with an indefinite “yes.” “Won’t you lend me your pipe a little while?” asked the other. He replied, looking straight by the man’s head, with a face singularly vacant to all neighboring interests, “Me got no pipe;” yet I had seen him put a new one, with a supply of tobacco, into his pocket that morning.

In other words, an intelligent and capable man quietly took the blows from inferior minds and made payback in his own way, in his own time. And on Eric read, more and more fully absorbed.

Until Danielle suddenly barked a laugh and raised her head. “Listen to this,” she said. “This explains
everything.
Eric.” And she read in her sure teacher’s voice, not even stumbling over the biological words, but only on the second use of the word
sex:

Sex drive, for instance, is associated with the hormone testosterone in both men and women. Romantic love is associated with elevated activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine and probably also another one, norepinephrine. And attachment is associated with the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin. “It turns out,” Fisher said, “that seminal fluid has all of these chemicals in it. So I tell my students, ‘Don’t have sex if you don’t want to fall in love.’ ”

Something in the firebox of the stove popped then whistled long, ending in a sigh and a crackle.

“So it’s all chemical,” Eric said.

“Not exactly news, I guess,” said Danielle.

They thought about that. Eric said, “I always thought it was something more.”

“But what? What more? Exactly what?”

“I don’t know. That it was the feelings that produced the chemicals, not the other way around.”

“Okay. Or maybe we could just leave the chemicals out of it. Like let’s say there was a kind of decaf jizz. Flinch. What would be left? For a couple in passion?”

Eric said, “Scientists are always trying to deny emotion. In psychology, as well. Like everything can be fixed with a pill. And everything you’d call human caused by an imbalance on one side or the other of a chemical reaction.”

“But they allow for religion, right?”

“I don’t really think so.”

“But scientists go to church, right?” Danielle was onto something, or certainly thought she was. She leaned into him excitedly, said, “And people who don’t go to church. What about them? They can have faith of all kinds anyway. Like faith in one another, or faith in a baseball team. Is that chemical? Does that come from sex? Answer is no. I think what love is, is that two people cross into a different world together because of a shared event or experience. Like, they cross together into one of the other worlds.”

“I like it. And contemporary physics certainly leaves room for alternate universes. So, answer me this: Once the lovers cross over, do they ever come back?”

Danielle scratched her cheek, pushed at her nose, sat up straight, flushed from clavicles to throat, inspired, a kind of fresh beauty overtaking her, nothing to do with her features: “Like, you go through an act or an episode or a moment of transcendence together, not sex, I’m not saying that, though I bet it occasionally happens then—even sex where no one orgasms—but some big event of mutual transmogrification!”

“You did go to college.”

“Something huge, something mutual, something as big as an earthquake or worlds colliding, something over the top, unmistakable, the sun exploding, though it could be too, like,
subtle
for others to see. And yes, they do come back to this world, because they never really leave. It could be as quiet as a blade of grass moving under the weight of an ant.”

“So, it could be even something as simple as a conversation?”

“Doubtful, yo. Though I suppose maybe sometimes. Really, really big though, even if it’s small, so that once you went through it, both people knew it. Something big, something majorly noticeable. It could be ecstatic, it could be tragic, it could be creamy, it could even really, really hurt.”

“You and Jimmy?”

“It could be false. Even though you both felt it. Like an ecstasy brought on by drugs.”

“Drugs like ecstasy?”

“Like crystal meth, I’m thinking.”

“So you’re saying yours with Jimmy was false?”

“I think it was. Though I felt it. And he felt it, too. Something exploding deep down under the world. But I never felt I loved him. No, I did, I felt I loved him, I feel I love him still, I was even in love with him, mister, but.”

“There wasn’t this transcendent event?”

“I think there was not. Or maybe there was. But maybe you only know after
x
number of years.”

They thought about that.

Eric said, “To tell the truth, I’m really confused here. Can you give me an example of the kind of thing you’re talking about? Another event of mutual transmogrification?”

“Birth.”

“Wow, Danielle. Just wow. That’s perfect.”

She beamed. “But of course all that, all that care and love and duty between a mother and child, that could be seen as chemical, too. So actually, it’s got to be more than that, too. A leap off a cliff, but you don’t literally jump. Instead you are jumped. You become a jump.”

Eric said, “You’re a philosopher.”

“More of an alchemist.”

“And a ghost as well.”

“I could eat,” said Danielle.

Twenty-One

ERIC BOILED THE
noodles from four boxes of her generic macaroni and cheese in as little water as possible, meanwhile dicing up some onion and jalapeno. Danielle read, one of those people who go through a magazine or book or instruction manual cover to cover and can’t skip ahead, only go back, which she seemed to do frequently. There was a little spider pan behind the stove and he found a medium-hot spot on the wide stovetop and heated some of his fine Tuscan olive oil to sauté the vegetables. When the pasta was ready he used the back of a table knife as a dam and strained the water into the hole in the old-time drainboard. Probably it just fell onto the ground below.

“Isn’t it time for wine yet?” Danielle called, as if he were far away, off in a proper kitchen in some other wing of some grand stone palace.

“I don’t know,” Eric said quietly. “I don’t normally drink very much at all.”

“Besides last night I haven’t had a drink of alcohol for, like, weeks,” she said. “And I was due. And my bag, that was gone a month ago.”

Bag of pot, she must mean.

“For the best,” Eric said.

Silence as she retrieved the second bottle of Alison’s Côtes du Rhône, silence as he beat two of his eggs. She watched him a while, sidled up beside him, stood too close, then very suddenly slammed the wine on the butcher’s block beside him. The pasta in its bowl jumped, the beaten eggs jumped, the other eggs in their carton jumped, the knife he’d been using jumped, and he himself—he jumped—practically onto her back. And then she did it again, slam! And everything jumped again, Eric, too. And once more, everything jumping. She bit the cork and pulled it out with a rude pop, held it in her teeth gazing at him, then spat it in his face, imitated his startled reaction.

Cheerfully she fetched their mugs and filled them both, then fell back into her chair by the stove. She clapped, she laughed, very pleased with herself. A kind of outsized joy seemed to have overtaken her. She slugged her wine.

Eric went soberly back to his project, beat the powdered cheddar cheese from several packets into the egg, beat in a little olive oil (butter would have been better), then grated a large amount of his Parmesan in. All of that he added to the pasta, dropped the sautéed onions and jalapenos in, mixed it all nicely, poured it into a bigger spider pan. Surreptitiously he opened her remaining bag of tortilla chips—he had the idea she’d protest—slid half of them out onto the butcher’s block, crushed them up as quietly as he could.

She tugged at her Rasta cap, yanked it off, had a long look at it, tossed it on the floor behind her, took up the magazine again, read closely, spoke abruptly, more or less to him: “Totally.”

“Totally,” he repeated. “Totally what?”

“This article. About how women have gotten more and more independence because of education. And women know how to do things, and they have
confidence,
also money of their own. But that society hasn’t caught up. Like that I haven’t got confidence and I haven’t got money, and like my husband’s backward fucking family. And I didn’t finish college.” The wind outside added emphasis, a shocking hard blast that made the cabin whistle and shudder, no more comedy.

He covered the pasta and cheese with tortilla-chip crumbs, grated more Parmesan on top. He used a spatula to arrange the coals in the firebox, slid the spider pan in. “Dinner is in the oven,” he said, no need to call her out: college, so what?

Twenty-Two

ERIC TRIED THOREAU
again, lost interest quickly, distracted by the problem of Danielle and by the roaring, sustained gusts of wind outside. He kept looking to the window but the window was blank white, the eye of the whale completely packed in by all the blown and thrown and dumped snow, nothing there but the reflection of the room around him in kerosene light. So. Over the top edge of
The Maine Woods
he watched Danielle. She was one of those hypnotized readers—nothing could distract her from the sentences, her head moving in a complicated rhythm, the big stiff pages turning, every ad examined, every illustration. Eric tried to imagine her in some other setting, dressed and groomed for someone’s wedding, maybe her own wedding to Jim, came up with positive results, a kind of auburn-y hair color—why not?—great waves of gleaming auburn hair. He sipped his wine and eyed the satisfyingly filled slipper tub at length, pondered thermodynamic calculations he was not fully equipped for: if you removed a few gallons of water from the twenty-five gallons in the tub and boiled it, then poured it back into the tub, and then removed a few more of the now somewhat heated gallons and boiled that, how long would it take (or would it even be possible?) to bring the water in the tub up to a nice, hot bath temperature?

He stood and stretched and yawned and had a look in the stove, used his stick to adjust the coals. Then, casually as he could, he tried the water in the tub with his fingers—very cold. He stirred it around with his hand, mixing the thermal layers—colder. With a shrug he pulled his sleeves down over his hands and lifted the lobster kettle off the stove, poured the couple of gallons already boiling in there into the tub, stirred again. Maybe one notch warmer?

He was always happiest when he had a project, Alison liked to say.

Danielle just kept reading.

The wind gusted again, an unceasing breath, a kind of burgeoning, louder and then louder yet. Even Danielle looked up. Something hit the roof with a thud. Then something else, and again, and then there was a roaring like unstopping surf and bigger, jostling thumps and then cracks like lightning straight above and something crashing toward them, rumbling louder and louder inside the howling, a tsunami approaching. Suddenly the cabin heaved on its moorings with a deep moan and squeal. Danielle shouted and leapt, slammed into Eric’s chest such that he fell. The stove jerked, the butcher’s block slid, the chairs followed, Danielle went down hard atop him and they tumbled together across the floor into the chairs and butcher’s block in a heap—Eric over Danielle. Then it was over, a quaking, creaking stop, ramen packages still falling one by one from the kitchen cabinets.

“Okay,” he said.

“What the fuck?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The snow must have let go. The snow on the hill. The ledge above us. All sitting so deep on that old ice.”

“You mean like an
avalanche
?” Danielle said.

“Avalanche, yes.”

“You’re panting like a dog.”

True. He held his breath a moment, lifted himself off her, got to his feet, helped her up. She’d been angular beneath him. One last packet of ramen fell. Then silence, then odd sighs from the woodwork, then a creaking that turned to a growling, like a creature in the yard, something that wanted to get in. The front door began to bulge, then humped into the room as they watched, thick wooden planks swelling like skin. Abruptly the latch popped and the door flew open and a loud, implacable tongue of snow high as the doorway and festooned with hemlock needles and bark and bits of branches pushed its way into the room a foot at a time, urged the couch sidewise, upset the table, spilled and overran Eric’s puzzle, reached lazily all the way to the window, kept filling in behind itself till no more snow could enter.

The cabin shuddered, groaned, settled once again.

“Okay,” Eric said. “It’s over.”

But a thunderclap sounded above, directly above. Then another —so loud that Eric bellowed in fright, grabbed for Danielle, who squealed. All but simultaneously a concussion, a blow to the gut, then the trailing sound, an explosion. The building lurched, and the far front corner, the permanent perpendicular meeting of two immovably heavy and well-made walls,
caved in,
a shocking snap of beams and boards and a shrieking of nails, the entire cabin heaving, bucking hard, grinding on its piers, then jerking dead, water splashing from the slipper tub.

Silence.

A few jagged breaths, Eric trying to settle his heart. He held Danielle without thinking, squeezed her to him—all bones. The little bookshelf upstairs teetered and fell over. The ladder slid along the edge of the loft, an afterthought, slid till it fell into the room with an anticlimactic crash. The wind whipped again, but this time into the new gape in the wall, blast of fresh snow, crisply frigid air, the storm reaching inside, a blast that kept coming, whitening the floor completely and all the furniture and Eric’s very shirt, snowflakes sizzling on the stove. Danielle held on tight, keeping Eric between her and whatever had crashed into the house, her mouth still open in surprise. The cabin creaked ominously.

And here came the next gust and cloud of snow, a billow of wind like a hurricane come inside. Jim’s photo levitated up past Danielle’s face—the wind had found it on the butcher’s block—made a couple of circuits of the room, blank white on one side, all Jimmy on the other. She reached for him, reached again, just out of grasp. The wind reversed, sucked the air out of the cabin loudly, sucked smoke and ashes from the stove into the air of the room, sucked Jimmy straight out into the night. The gale reversed
again,
clouds of snow and sticks and ice and pine needles pelting them, filling the house. Danielle pushed Eric to the floor, lay over him, protective. The wind roared doubly, then doubly again, and then another deafening crack, an explosion, the night itself breaking, a temblor rocking the very planet.

Inexorably then, two thick white-pine branches—tree-size branches—slid through the gape of fractured boards and tarpaper fragments and shattered shingles, a crazy slow inexplicable motion, a kind of reaching, the snapped branches like a giant’s hands feeling for people to eat, bundles of pine needles on their thousand twigs, everything snapping and dragging and shockingly fragrant, huge ancient boughs pushing through the dense ridge of snow that had come through the door, pushing the mighty and immovable butcher’s block easily, eerily, one inch, then two, then three, the great bole of the tree settling into all the snow out front, settling snugly against the cabin, which moved back in jerks, juddering on its piers.

Danielle’s hands in his face, snow jammed in his eyes, jammed in his nostrils. She brushed at him, blew at him, patted his face. Another gust roared into the broken building, a sustained blast, the fire in the stove flaring, the kerosene lamp brightening, wavering, then going out, sudden dimness, just the hopping firelight, sudden silence. Danielle jumped up, found matches in the corner, lit the lamp again, her hands shaking violently.

Eric staggered to his feet, legs quaking, snow and twigs down his shirt, snow in his pants. There wasn’t a tarp in the shed, nothing like that; he’d inventoried the place in his thorough way. In an emergency you acted. You did not just stand there. Navy training. Eric propped the loft ladder back up and Danielle climbed it, found the old wool blanket she’d let him use. In the shed he found a hammer and a coffee can full of roofing nails—big, flat heads, old-school.

At the broken wall Danielle held the blanket as best she could in the face of the wind, balancing like a surfer on the still inching and twitching pine branches, pressing a hem onto the boards, what remained of the cabin wall above the breach. Eric was able to get a nail in at that spot, then another further along, Danielle carefully smoothing the hem ahead of him, efficient team. The top of the blanket was securely in place as the wind picked up again, but the bottom was still loose, rippling. Danielle tried to get it under control with her feet, then all fours—he’d have to nail the bottom to the huge branches—but there was another strong blast, the ratty, dense wool billowing inward, flapping against them, knocking Danielle off her perch, nearly Eric, too. In the next calm she tried again and quickly he nailed the bottom hem in place, a roofing nail every foot or so, nailed it right to the encroaching tree, then nailed both sides to the broken boards that had been the walls, an imperfect and very permeable barrier. But snow would build up on and around it, he thought, seal the rift, become a wall. Or maybe not: the next gust came roaring. The blanket bellied inward, bellied out, bellied inward again, the cloth straining, both Eric and Danielle pushing at it ineffectually, then—
pop-pop-pop
—the nails let go. Then outward again, the blanket billowing into the darkness, held by four nails, then three, then two. With a shout, Danielle rescued it, holding shattered boards and leaning precariously out into the night, gathered the folds hand over hand, feeding the old wool cloth back to Eric. When the wind abated briefly they tried again, a nail every inch this time, nearly the whole can, nearly all of Eric’s energy, too, the blanket doubled at the hem for strength—Danielle’s idea, silently enacted—and at the next prolonged gust the blanket held, snapping out like a mainsail after a jibe, then filling with wind, sudden pop inward, equally sudden satisfaction: teamwork.