Cascade (25 page)

As the back of her head pressed against the ground, she partitioned her mind away from her body and let the body take over, reveling in the feel of his skin, slippery with sweat from the effort of closing the dam, his bones pressing into her, the smell of his hair, everything that was new and different. They whispered to each other.
I love your hair. I love the way your skin feels. I love everything about you.
Everything that is wonderful about me, you see, and everything that is wonderful about you, I see
. It was bliss, a blur of feeling, a kaleidoscope of dizzy joy, and they kissed in a languid, all-the-time-in-the-world way, rolling around the grass for so long that by the time he looked at her questioningly, asking for permission to go further, she was beyond stopping and dismissed the fleeting thought—what if a baby came of it? She was on her seventh day, teetering on the line between safe and fertile, but she gave in to recklessness, to the gamble. She wanted him. She told him that she wanted him, that she had wanted him forever, and he murmured that he, too, had dreamed of this, his lips sticking to her hair, his words muffled, his hand fumbling at his waist. When she felt him inside her she thought all the things that people stupid with love think—
this is meant to be, we are truly connected now
—stunned by the solid fact of him, and by the pleasure his body knew how to give her, the building of it, incredible and fleeting, and then that moment, very fierce and satisfying, a moment that seemed to hang on to itself as if it could never end.

It ended, that moment did. It passed. They gazed up at the branches, the birds, the patches of blue sky, becoming acutely aware of themselves, their two separate bodies, the air between them moist and hot and smelling faintly metallic.

Where a few minutes earlier, all external objects outside the boundaries of themselves had seemed blurred, now Dez saw the beginnings and ends of things: the nubby weave of Jacob’s trousers, collapsed in an undignified heap by his ankles, the freckles on her forearm, the bones of his pelvis digging into her side. A dandelion, dark yellow and fragrant, tickled her cheek.

Jacob shot up to a sitting position, the intimacy of just minutes before becoming, dismayingly, a thing of the past as panic quickened on his face. He reached down for his pants. “Anyone could have seen us.”

“It’s Secret Pond, remember,” she said, sounding more certain than she felt. But she sat up, too, and glanced around. The clearing was peaceful, undisturbed, but his unease infected her. She smoothed out her dress and tucked her hair behind her ears, feeling suddenly exposed and shy. She needed a towel. Jacob’s hands moved to button his fly and she averted her eyes, again, dismayed. They had been so close and already they were apart.

“Do you feel strange?” he asked.

She wanted reassurance, talk of fatedness, not him shaking his head as if he had irreparably harmed them both. Wasn’t it the woman who was supposed to be full of remorse?

She felt uncertain and apprehensive. “No,” she said, false bravado that she hoped would be transmitted to him, thinking,
Let’s be happy, our time is so short. Life is so short
.

“I do,” he said. “I feel strange.”

She wanted to take back what she said and give the honest response, which was like his own.
Yes
, she should have said.
I feel strange but there’s no need for us to feel strange if only we are connected, if we are together in this
.

It wasn’t like he wasn’t a gentleman. He did the right things. He took
her hand to help her as they picked their way back around the pond and into the woods. At one point along the path, he stopped and sighed and she followed his gaze. Another pink lady slipper, enfolded in its green hood.

“Whenever I see something beautiful, I think of you.” But he looked so troubled, saying that, so bemused.

They really weren’t so beautiful at all, Dez thought. Didn’t they, really, look a bit repulsive, like miniature pink-veined lungs? Part of nature’s repetition of patterns.

A few minutes later, he said, “If only things had been different.”

“What things?”

“I was thinking of that painting I gave you. I suppose I wanted you to have a little part of my life. I suppose I wish our lives hadn’t been so different.”

“They’re not all that different.” Was he talking about his culture? His family? His mother with her two cupboards?

“I like to think I’m different from my family, more
bohemian
.” He made a self-deprecatory gesture. “That first day I saw you, and talked to you, and you looked like that painting of Beatrice I loved, I thought,
My God, here’s the woman who will be my muse. I’ve found her
.”

He had?

“But you were married. And now, I suppose when I think about settling down, having children, I’m more traditional than I think.”

The acknowledged remorse coupled with his lack of clarity was terrible, made her feel all churned up. Was he saying a life with Jewish Ruth was not undesired after all? What was he saying? That an artist’s life in Greenwich Village didn’t have to mean giving up traditional aspects of his culture? Why was it so hard to ask? She thought of the pregnancy she had possibly risked with a quick, sharp prick of fright. It was impossible to think of what to say and have it be the right thing.

“I don’t want to be sorry,” she said. She wanted to hear him say that, too. But he gave her a long, sympathetic look that she recognized as
regret and which irritated her. And it irritated her that she couldn’t admit her irritation, because she didn’t want him to misunderstand, she didn’t want to drive him away. But why couldn’t he just be lighthearted, at least for now, and live in the moment? In a hundred years they would both be dead, and wasn’t it good they’d had this hour together?

They walked, the sound of the river flowing over rocks and up over roots, their feet moving, time advancing, River Road becoming visible through the foliage. They emerged through the trees into the bright daylight of the street, squinting at the brightness, too quickly reaching his truck.

He didn’t jump right in but she sensed he wanted to.

If only he would say something, reveal what he is really thinking
.

“So you said you have to make a few trips back and forth,” she said tentatively.

“I do have to come back in the morning. With more stuff for Al. Probably Saturday, too.”

“Asa goes to Hartford on Saturday. It’s his monthly trip. He gets supplies and visits his brother and never gets back till late—”

He cut her off—gently, but still. She tried to hide how stung she felt. “Maybe we shouldn’t prolong the agony,” he said. “Maybe we should just say good-bye now.”

Why, she wanted to ask. Why couldn’t they establish where each of them stood? Why was it so hard to speak?

At home in the kitchen, she sat with her head in her hands until she couldn’t stand the silence. Then she roused herself to begin wringing out the second load of laundry. Asa’s white broadcloth shirt, her nightgown, flattening between the rollers as she pushed each item through the wringer. She dumped the wet pile into the wicker basket and carried it outside, where an east wind whipped up from the river, making her eyes water as she wrestled to pin the clothes to the line, bending and pinning, bending and pinning shirts and socks and trousers to the clothesline like some numb automaton.

And then the wind ceased blowing, so abruptly that Asa’s trousers did a final little dance before they slumped and hung limp.

She’d made a cuckold out of her husband.
Cuckold
—that Middle English–sounding word, more suited to the stage of the Cascade Theater than a modern house on River Road.
It is a heartbreaking thing to see a handsome man loose-wiv’d
—that line from somewhere.
Antony and Cleopatra
?
Loose-wiv’d
.

How could so much have happened so quickly? She looked down at the damp shorts in her hand. She had committed adultery. Adultery. The four syllables reverberating in her head. Seen objectively, what she’d done was unforgivable, so why was it that a deep and central part of her was glad she had done it? At the same time she felt hurt, because how could Jacob have been content to say good-bye like that? When he would come back to Cascade tomorrow and Saturday? She couldn’t stand the thought of him coming here without seeing her again, so how could he stand it? And how could she go back to the business of living when all the hours left to her seemed to hang, suspended in limbo?

She pinned the last shirt to the line and headed into her studio, where she came face-to-face with his painting.

She wished the subject were anyone or anything but his mother with her penetrating eyes.
No one is good enough for my son
, those eyes said.
Especially you.

She turned away from it and sat down. She had to work. The edge of the table pushed against her ribs; it felt real and hard and cold. There was a new set of postcards to conceive and complete.

She had been considering a two-card, duel-type comparison of Cascade and Whistling Falls, but had she interfered in that decision? She’d closed Asa’s dam. The knowledge dropped through her the way the word
adultery
had. She’d closed Asa’s dam, with none of the nervousness that billowed through her now like those clothes drying in the wind.

But the pond was already filled. Asa’s plan had already worked. She told herself there was no need to worry, to concentrate instead on her work.

Which will it be? Cascade or Whistling Falls?
She pressed pencil to
paper. She had to start somewhere, with some line, some form, had to concentrate on the task at hand, draw one line and then another until a pleasing concordance of shapes assembled under her hand.

And that was the saving grace of art. As soon as you started to immerse yourself, even slightly, you could be swept up, absorbed. The banjo clock struck three thirty, four. At four thirty she got to her feet. She’d managed to complete the first card: a firmly honest representation of Whistling Falls’s rolling farmland and fertile valley.

In the kitchen, she rooted through the cutlery drawer to find Rose’s old meat hammer. Using it to pound chicken breasts flat between wax paper, she suddenly missed Rose so much she had to pause a moment, had to pinch between her eyes. She rolled the breasts in bread crumbs and fried them in lard. She mashed three potatoes. Then she rolled and dragged the washing machine back to its corner, scraping her ankle on the rusty wheel as she did so, a quick stab of pain that brought tears to her eyes and triggered a flow of them.

When Asa came home, he took in her swollen eyes and asked what was wrong. She pretended she had cramps and then felt worse, seeing the disappointment in his eyes.

It was easy to hate herself that evening. On his way back to the drugstore for the evening shift, Asa asked did she want him to bring her home some ice cream? Something to soothe her stomach? He noticed her scraped-up palms. “What happened here?”

“Brambles,” she said. “From the raspberry canes.”

He rooted in the medicine cabinet and found a tube of salve. “Here,” he said, “keep that on there.” Then he headed back to town. When the door shut behind him, Dez sank against the door frame. He deserved better, she told herself. She even said it aloud: “He deserves a wife who appreciates salve on her hands, who wants three or four babies, who isn’t consumed with another man.”

But she was not that kind of wife. She was the type who brewed a cup of tea and gave in to replaying the afternoon’s moments over and over in
her mind. Jacob had said, “
I didn’t even know if you would want to see me again. I was so relieved when I got your telegram
.” He had said, “
Maybe we shouldn’t prolong the agony. Maybe we should just say good-bye now
.” Perhaps she had been too sensitive, too negative. She couldn’t be sure he wasn’t in the same miserable limbo she felt herself to be in. She could at least inform him about the job in New York, see if he responded positively to the news.

She had never telephoned him, and every muscle in her body contracted at the thought of doing so. But she made herself lift the earpiece, even though her heartbeat was so out of control that when Lil or Alma or someone picked up, she set it down again.

She couldn’t do it.

But neither could she go on like this—agitated, second-guessing everything.

She picked up the phone again. Alma came on, and though Dez knew it was best to speak cryptically, at least Alma Webster wasn’t a gossip. She gave Alma the number, then waited while the line rang through. She prayed that he would answer, or that at least his sister would, but an impatient old-lady voice came through the crackle and static of the line. “Hallo? Hallo?”

Dez plowed through the moment, explaining that she was Dez Spaulding and was looking for Jacob. She expected that Mrs. Solomon would at least know who Dez Spaulding was.

“Who? Eh? Who?” she said, her accent thick and hard to decipher. “Despoldingk, hah?”

“I’m looking for Jacob?”

She deciphered that Jacob was “out in the evening.”