The Remedy for Love: A Novel (8 page)

Fourteen

LATER THEY SAT
on cushions on opposite sides of his puzzle, looking for flower pieces, and there were a lot of flower pieces to find, a jumble of them to be piled in color groups, all the castle gardens foreground. It was way too cold in that corner of the cabin, and so Danielle had put the big coat on. The smelly coat. Eric was just shivering, his ruined jacket over his lap, but something about the project being literally between them had tamped down the emotion.

“I always wanted to live in a castle,” Danielle said. “I always wanted stone walls.”

“My house is stone.”

She made a face: So what about his house? She said, “What insect would you be?”

“In the castle?”

“In bed. With Jimmy being the bedbug.”

“Huh. I guess I haven’t thought about that.”

“Dung beetle? Get the job done?”

“Something nicer. Luna moth. Or maybe a luna moth caterpillar.”

“So slinky and silky soft. And green.”

“You’ve seen ’em. With these little horns. How about you?”

“Black widow?”

“Fair warning. I’ll tell the fellas.”

“Jimmy’d be gone three and four days every month, which gave me time to think. Army Reserves. And do you know what I thought about? I thought about how I was going to get rid of him, that’s what I thought about. That and resting my various fucking sphincters. Flinch.” She began assembling a patch of puzzle roses—quick, deft fingers. “But he comes back Sunday night late with, like, mud in his hair and a big scrape across his cheek, forehead bruised, uniform all ripped to shreds, and, well.” Behind the roses as she built them was a patch of garden wall, and that was the clue they needed, together adding her chunk of the puzzle to the section Eric had been working on. She moved onto the daisies. “This one time? Coming home? He’s bought an engagement ring somewhere. He drops on his knee. He says he’s felt he’s loved me forever. Not ‘I love you’ but ‘I feel I have loved you.’ He hadn’t mentioned about love before. Took me by surprise.”

“Well,” said Eric after a pause to search for more red. “Really, it’s nice.” He continued work on the wall with the roses, methodical, absorbed.

She pressed daisies together, piece by piece, unnervingly quick. The wind was quiet. Everything was quiet, muffled. She said, “I dig talking with you. You sit there and listen. And you haven’t said one single stupid fucked-up thing for a while. Plus you flinch like a nun, which is trustworthy. And no hard-on, though you’re definitely a dick.”

He flinched. Not so fast on the hard-on. Her camisoles up around her face, the perfection of her navel in the devastation. And of course the wind picked up again, and continued to mount. He said, “I like talking with you, too.”

“Ask me questions. I like when you ask me questions. I like that you listen.”

“Well, here’s the main one. How did you end up down here? In the cabin, I mean.”

“Professor DeMarco. It’s hers. Or like her husband’s family’s. She said I could use it. I’d been talking with her on the phone and texting and so on and e-mails. She was always trying to get me back in school. Nice to be loved, yo.”

Eric said, “Well, yes, it is.”

“You take everything so
seriously.
Daisies. Over there. I see some over there.” She looked a child suddenly, collecting her pieces as he picked them out for her, talking away: “She said if I needed I could come stay as long as I liked, stay the whole summer. She knew how hard everything had been with school and with Jim deployed. I thought I was going mental. She thought I needed a rest. And so I did come and stay here. She walked down twice to visit and she was pretty nice, but maybe a little overly, like, weird? We swam in the river. We talked and talked. I mean, it was nice. She was really nice. She swam naked, and she’s unbelievably fat. And I was supposed to go back to Presque Isle and be with Jim’s family and substitute teach again on some fucking random calendar date, and she and her husband came exactly then and helped me carry my stuff up and load my car. They were going to stay here. I just couldn’t go
back.
Not to Presque Isle. Not without Jimmy there. I stayed on the road for the two weeks the DeMarcos were down living here, slept in the car, drove up to, like, New Brunswick, Bay of Fundy, some campground up there, pretty dramatic, ate wild fresh salmon this craggy dude would catch and sell on the beach but that he just gave me free. And don’t think I fucked him, because I didn’t, not really. And I avoided everyone else. I barely noticed the beauty of the earth. Then I drove back down here, broke. So I sold the car to the dealer over on High Street? Moody’s Used Vickles? And then I came back down here to live till I could figure out the next thing. But I didn’t have a single dime to rub together, as my father would say.”

“How do you not really fuck someone?”

“You just really don’t fuck them. Not for a fish.”

“And you came down here.”

“Yes, back down here.”

“But you’d sold the car.”

“Moody gave me like two thousand bucks for it, enough to pay it off and still have, like, three hundred dollars, which went faster than you’d think, like two trips for groceries and this trip today.”

“And Professor DeMarco doesn’t know you’re here.”

“Professor DeMarco doesn’t know. But she wouldn’t care.” Danielle made a Professor DeMarco face, hunched down, spoke in a high falsetto, what might have been comic in another setting: “She’d be
so
worried.
”

There was something he’d very much wanted to tell Danielle while she was talking about Jim, but he couldn’t quite get it in his head again as another gust rocked the house. So instead he said, “Maybe I can get you your car back, or at least a better deal. It’s not actually illegal to take advantage of people in distress, but it’s not hard to embarrass someone like that, like Myron Moody, get a positive result.”

“You know him?”

He knew him.

Danielle pulled her Rasta cap off, scratching her head unhappily. Her hair was really very dirty and matted and clumped, not in dreads at all, the only style being neglect. “A positive result,” she said. “A positive result.” She was the girl from the grocery store checkout line again, lost in that coat, suspicious, that huge, smelly coat. “Fucking freezing,” she said, pulling it around her. She used the table to help her stand, pushing it toward him roughly, displacing the puzzle, one of the flower piles landing in his lap.

“I’m not drunk,” she said. He noticed pine needles on her neck. And a phrase came to him, as if in a headline:
YOUNG WOMAN ABANDONED
.

He struggled to his feet, too, followed her to the stove. She shed the coat, put it on its nail. Her skinny jeans, Eric noted, weren’t skinny enough to keep up with her anymore, hung off her hips (and would have fallen right down except for the heavily studded leather belt, which was like something from a tractor supply, or more like torture chamber), a pocket worn to threads by a cell phone that was no longer present, the seat worn by a full fanny gone missing. He’d like to feed her. He’d make her huge meals. He’d like to take her shopping, or let her take him. The smokestack shuddered, the cabin groaned, the wind spoke from every corner, these long gusts that only grew.

She turned on him angrily: “Like I’m something you brought home from the shelter. ‘A positive result.’ You think I’m a
rescue.
” And before he could protest she collected the oil lamp, lurched to the ladder, climbed unsteadily. “Dick!” she said. “Lawyer! Phone addict! Loser! You can stay down there and ponder the legalities.” She shuffled and clanked and thumped up there a long time as Eric built up the fire. Then she threw down a blanket, next a pillow, finally pulled the ladder up behind her, blew out the light.

Fifteen

ERIC WIPED HIS
teeth with a piece of paper towel, carefully getting to all the corners and swishing with boiled river water, taste of the very slime on the rocks, like summer. He picked up his bedding, what she’d thrown down, a lumpy pillow with no case, but a nice thick wool blanket, army green. The mission-oak couch was too short to lie on, so he tossed its hard cushions on the floor between the puzzle and a growing snowdrift blown in through merest crack, beautiful, depressing, a long, scalloped sculpture. In faint firelight he added the cushions from the chairs, made himself a little pad on the small carpet and lay down in his clothes, covered himself. Field bed. Too cold. He got back up, folded the blanket into a kind of sleeping bag or taco shell and climbed back in, much better. The pillow smelled of smoke and Ben-Gay and cough drops and mildew: the stench of isolation. His shoulder was very sore, now that he thought about it. He was the one who should have been taking Advil.

He woke abruptly in the night—the wine like a rat in his head—minutes or hours later, he couldn’t tell. He was freezing, though, that was sure. He pulled the blanket tight as he could, hopeless. The temperature outside had plummeted as the guy on
News 5
had predicted, and so had the temperature inside. He turned this way, turned that way. The horsehair cushions crackled under him. He had to piss like a race car (as his father used to say). His head began to ache. His mouth was dry as hemlock twigs. He got up, thought to go outside, remembered the snow chest-high and who knew what drifts, crazy, the door entirely blocked. The wind had picked up again. Alison hated it when he farted. He peed in a pail he found with the pots and pans, emptied it quickly at the drain board, put it back. He’d have to swab it out with snow in the morning. Somewhere outside, of course, after he’d dug them an escape route. He built up the fire—maybe it had been hours—then moved his whole sleeping arrangement close to it, but on the floor it didn’t matter: perfectly fucking freezing. The wind was howling again, raging, suddenly shrieking through all the boards of the house, clattering the loose siding, dragging laden branches across the drifts on the roof, thumps and screeches and odd, muffled snaps, the cabin filled again with living air, dry and sharp and just very,
very
cold.

Upstairs there was a rustling and a private sigh. Then the wind, again, building.

“Eric.”

“I woke you,” he said.

She said, “I haven’t actually slept.”

“I did. Some anyway. Maybe a couple of hours.”

“Uh, no. More like a couple of fifteen minutes. You snore. Are you frozen?”

“I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”

“It’s warm up here. It’s fine up here. You’d better come up, mister. I’m in my sleeping bag. Bring your blanket. But don’t get any fucking ideas.”

“Don’t worry. I haven’t had an idea in months.”

“You had an idea earlier.”

The ladder came down, seemingly on its own. Danielle struck a match, bright as sun. Then the lamplight. He gave her a moment to get back in under her covers, climbed the ladder dragging his bedding behind him like Linus. Simple truth: heat rises. Danielle in her Rasta cap helped arrange his blanket, carefully folding it to open away from her. Something startling in the shapes her clavicles made, not that he was looking. She’d startled him all day with her strange, retractable beauty, like a cat’s claws.

“There,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said.

“But take off your shirt.”

“Better not.”

“Just take it off.”

He unbuttoned it, pulled it off. Good idea, preserve some small corner of freshness for morning.

“Your shoulder,” she said.

It was bruised, he could see, and pretty badly. He shrugged.

She said, “You really did try to smash down that door.”

“At the vet’s, yes. It was armored in some way. I hurt my foot, too.”

“It’s all the dog drugs they have in there.”

“Heartworm.”

“And take off your pants.”

He did, and then his boxers, too (a kind of bravado), and slipped quickly into bed as she looked away. She blew out the light. He settled in with his back to her and they lay a long time like that, close enough to feel the heat between them.

“Who
sent
you?” Danielle whispered seriously, suddenly.

“Oprah,” Eric whispered back.

“Would you please,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Eric said.

And they were silent. At length, she whispered, “I was smart to go for groceries. Somewhere in me I just knew.” She turned on her side behind him, put her arm over him, placed a hand on his chest. “I’m going to bite you.”

“Well,” he said.

“If you come here,” she murmured, pulling him closer.

“Really,” he said. “Better not.”

“We saved each other,” she said, oddly fervent, bubbling like a pot in a way he could
feel,
and not just through her hand. Heart-to-heart, as his mother used to say, soul-to-soul, too mystical for his taste.

They listened to the storm, the muffled hits of who knew what on the roof.

She kissed his hurt shoulder.

“I don’t know,” he said, aroused.

“But what?” she whispered, biting him, ten little bites across his bruises, rising up behind him and over him to bite his chest. She kissed his neck, stroked his belly, kissed his ear.

“No,” he said.

“Just what I was thinking,” she said. “No way.”

“We will be fine friends,” he said.

“You sound like Winnie the fucking Pooh,” she said gently, resting her cheek on his shoulder.

“Black widow,” he said.

“That’s better.” She bit him once more, maybe a little hard, patted his chest, reached suddenly to grab his erection, which was straining, moment of no return, moment that best intentions fled. “Mm,” she said.

“No,” he said. He had a responsibility.

“Just checking,” she said, giving a hard squeeze. Then she let go, patted his belly, stroked his chest, kissed that shoulder once more. “You’re nice,” she said. “And you are very strong.”

“Not really,” he said.

She bit him hard. But she was done, whatever her project was. She bit him once again, more gently, then kissed him tenderly, kissed that shoulder sweetly, kissed it again and again, leaving it wet, finally turned away from him. Shortly her breath came even, came slowly, came deep, a secret reserve. Carefully he turned and watched her in the faint light, the light of the fading fire, made out the barest lineaments of her face, something important there, he felt, something deep, too, the wind crashing outside, something he couldn’t quite fathom, something terrifying, as in, tie yourself to the mast, the wind mounting higher, relief at a narrow escape—that was part of it, too. He couldn’t look away. The way she had contained him, the way she had parried him, the arc she had made of the afternoon and the evening, all designed, he felt now, felt the strength of her, the hidden power of her, the thing visible in her face, where in the grocery store and just after he’d only seen weakness, a reflection he now realized, her way of showing him
himself,
the loose roofing or siding or whatever it was clattering, all of it a kind of tide washing over him, that he was nothing, and fear, and sleep.