Doubles (12 page)

Paige said, “I have devised a way for all three of us to ride.”

In the street in front of Katie’s apartment I loaded their bags into the trunk, from which I first had to remove a strange collection of brightly painted pottery wrapped in newspaper. Paige then emerged from inside carrying the long red cushion from the love seat. She laid it across the passenger seat and emergency brake. There was just enough clearance for the gearshift.

“Now this coupe seats three,” she said.

“Coupe?”

“Car.”

“But that blocks the seat belt.”

Paige ignored me and climbed into the middle, positioning her legs on either side of the gear hub, the shifter standing rigid between her legs.

“I’m not going to ride without my seat belt,” I said.

“You just rode without even sitting in a seat.”

“I didn’t like it.”

“You can reach the seat belt on that side,” Paige said, pointing to the steering wheel.

I had not driven since the accident. I had resigned myself to walking, biking, taking the Chapel Hill bus system to the grocery store, relying on friends to take me to dinner, calling a cab for a dentist appointment. Now Katie was already arranging herself in the passenger seat, adjusting her purse at her feet. I looked around, as if someone might help. There was no one on the block except for an old lady walking three pugs. So I got in the driver’s seat, buckled up, put my hand on that rod protruding from Paige’s crotch, and shifted into first.

It was a Wednesday morning, late, so the traffic was light, and we rolled up the West Side Highway under the speed limit, the boats wobbling against a glimmering Hudson in the Boat Basin to our left.
We were going to Katie’s mountain house. Paige took charge of the radio and somehow found opera again.

There was no third gear, which meant I had to muscle that shifter out of and back into Paige’s crotch in one violent motion to shift from second to fourth.

“I must say I admire your restraint in regard to the speed limit,” Paige said as I shifted out of her crotch and into fifth coming over the George Washington Bridge.

We passed a tourist bus filled with Japanese families who all crowded the windows to take our picture. I guess to them a young man and two beautiful women in a green Fiat convertible with bullhorns was probably like us seeing a rickshaw filled with geishas in Tokyo. Paige waved.

“Do you not like driving?” she said.

Katie had shown Paige photos of me in my awkward years, and probably earlier, but had apparently made no mention of my wife. The thought that she was guarding that complicated knowledge made me feel safe as we sped through the salty air over the Hudson while a woman on the radio sustained a high vibrato note, leaving the waving Japanese to their daydreams of our American road trip. I shrugged, as if to say,
Driving, it’s not all bad
. My thoughts drifted away from Anne and Kaz, and as I passed over that water, I felt like I was just floating.

We rolled upstate along a river with bodies floating by on large rubber inner tubes in the opposite direction; past a railroad with a sightseeing train traveling at a snail’s pace along the river; between steep canyons and crashing white water, the air cooling precipitously and opera still on; and finally, two hours later, up a driveway, cut into the side of a mountain, that wound back and forth for more than a mile until we came to a gravel clearing at a weathered green clapboard house with cedar shingles and a broken-down BMW in the driveway with TOW brushed in soap across the windshield.

Three Adirondack chairs and a hammock were worn but looked like they would last decades more, bought with some impossible Katie knowledge. Standing in the high grass was a large bull sculpted from dark, weather-stained bronze. A tarnished brass candelabra half full of melted burgundy candle stubs stood on the porch, miniature mountains of wax reaching up towards their sources from the floorboards. Inside the sun-filled living room, an old Sunday
Times
was scattered across wide wooden floorboards before a scuffed leather couch. For the first time the truth hit me that Katie had left the geography of our childhood behind. She now had roots in this cold state. The streets of her dog-walking from the pool were occupied by only me now, walking the soft tar alone with a single pink tennis ball.

Immediately Paige opened the fridge and started making a list. Katie disappeared into a bedroom. I sat on a high metal shop stool beside a worn chopping block, and my cell phone began to ring. I took it out of my pocket and looked at the display.

“It’s Manny,” I said.

“So?”

“Mind if I answer?”

Before Paige could respond, Katie entered the room, and I slid the phone back into my pocket.

“What is the co-op number again?” Paige said.

Katie rattled off a string of digits.

“Company card,” I said, handing her Combover’s Visa. “It’s for expenses.”

She shrugged and put the card into her jeans.

My room had a doorway that was too short for my head and a view of the backyard, which was expansive and ended at the edge of a pond, where a narrow dock stretched twenty feet into the water. The sun was low over the line of trees at the far edge of the lake, and countless shattered pieces of it undulated in a brilliant display across
the surface. The bed was narrow and hard, and there was one simple chest of drawers that looked like it had been in this very room since the day the house was built. I opened the top drawer. Inside were four framed photos of Manny and Katie, some shriveled marijuana in a plastic bag, and a small metal pipe. Katie said, “Looking for drugs?”

She stood in the doorway. She had changed into a white dress and a straw hat that I recognized as once having been Manny’s.

“Want to do some?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’m gonna stroll before the sun goes down,” she said, ignoring me. If she had said OK, I would have smoked that marijuana. In this place I felt like I could become someone else. I felt the compulsion to.

“I would prefer an escort,” she said.

Two parallel gravel strips with a median of weeds led into the trees along the water. The sun was not yet down, and a few green leaves blew off the oak trees as we walked, falling in slow spirals, lit by the horizontal beams of sunlight. A gigantic tree lay in the pond, fallen from its perch on the bank, leaving its roots grasping for air above an earthen crater. I stepped into the hole where those roots had once held earth and looked up. A great heron flew overhead, low, squawking a guttural cry through its massive folded neck, and we both watched it pass, bending our heads skyward. I had spent so many hundreds of hours under varying skies, but it was always on a cleared surface, a coated space, a concrete rectangle or a clay court or a small patch of mowed and manicured grass. I hadn’t walked through nature in what felt like decades.

“You look like a little boy,” Katie said.

“I feel like one.”

Our parallel gravel strips led us to the far edge of the pond, from where we could see a single ramshackle house on the opposite bank.

“I wish I could live in that house year-round,” Katie said.

“Whose is it?”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “That’s my house.”

I couldn’t believe it was the very house I had just been in. It was too small, too run-down. From inside it had seemed so spacious. Katie had asserted the same architectural magic upon it as she had on Manny’s apartment.

“Think that thing works?” she said.

“What thing?”

“That.”

She pointed towards a dark space under the low branch of a live oak tree. I looked more closely. In the shadow rested a green paddleboat with a muddy white wheel.

“It yours?”

She shrugged and stuck out her bottom lip. “It’s always been there.”

“Let’s.”

“Really?”

“They used to call me Slow, but now they call me Fast,” I said.

“Now they call you a huge dork,” she said. I kicked the plastic side of the paddleboat, and it resonated deep and plastic. “Sounds seaworthy to me.”

It floated, sure enough, and we pedalled ourselves into the middle of the pond. The sun cast its final rays on the tops of the trees on the bank from where we had departed. The tips of the oaks glowed orange, the leaves like fading embers. It was the moment I had been waiting for for almost twenty years. I was alone on a pond with a single Katie. She was looking down, and I reached for her hand. She squeezed firmly, looked up, the sky glowing a deep purple behind her, and said, “We’re sinking.”

I looked at my feet. Water was rapidly filling the bottom of the boat, already inches high. Katie laughed. I took the hat off her head and began bailing water with it, the water pouring back into the boat through the hundreds of small holes in the weave. The craft was sinking
precipitously. We abandoned ship, swimming away as it tilted onto its side like a mammoth steamer sinking in the distance on an old newsreel.

At its widest point, the pond stretched probably three hundred yards from shore to shore. We had swum lengths like this for fun dozens of times, had had breath-holding contests that lasted minutes. Katie swam well ahead of me towards the house, her dress trailing in a rippling white wake. Between surfacing for air, bobbing in and out of that murky water, she pulled up, smiled, and said, “Hey, you want to—” and I knew she was going to say
race
, but she bobbed low, and for a brief moment the surface of the pond rose higher than her bottom lip, and she inhaled. Her eyes widened playfully, as if she had forgotten we were still a hundred yards from the bank. She tried to cough, but nothing came out.

A sense of inevitability seemed to swoop low over the pond. This was simply what happened now: If you were female, and spoke with me, or left the house with me, or walked around a pond with me, or—let alone—if I happened to be in love with you, then you were going to suffer a terrible trauma, and I was going to see it, and I wasn’t going to be able to stop it, and it was going to be my fault.

By the time I reached her, her eyes were wild, wide and shifting, surprised that this could happen, of all people, to her. She strained against her saturated lungs. I put my arms around her and squeezed. All that happened was I tipped her face directly into the water. I wrapped my arm around her chest, my left hand deep in her armpit, and swam. As I kicked towards land she went limp.

I wondered if, when I called the police, they were going to bring up my records and see that my wife had almost died in my arms within the same year and think it was too much of a coincidence. I wondered if they would find that Dart at Al’s Garage and finally inspect the brake pedal that they had never even looked at, if they would
charge me with murder, or attempted murder, because in truth I felt they should.

Near the bank my feet settled into an invisible slimy mass, and I flailed through the shallows. I dropped Katie on the pebbles along the water’s edge. Against the bluing flesh of her thin face, I noticed for the first time that she was wearing Paige’s lipstick. The shade had blended invisibly before but was suddenly vulgar and bright against her now fading tone.

I had been taught CPR in endless athletic training programs, starting in elementary school, then in high school when I lifeguarded at the club, in college as part of the safety training for athletes, and at an ATP training camp for new professionals. All of that had been done on dolls, though. A latex torso. Katie was not latex.

Somewhere a dog barked, and it awakened me to my own physical condition. I was shaking. I had lost my shoes, and my feet were bleeding, diluted crimson streaks running across the small pebbles back into the pond. I couldn’t feel the wounds.

I lowered my mouth to Katie’s red lips and, while I was blowing the second breath into her, she vomited into my mouth. I spit the bile back onto her chest. So much adrenaline rushed through me that I threw up some of my own. I flipped her onto her side. Water coursed from between her painted lips and onto the small, mute-colored pebbles until she coughed a tiny sputter, the pond lapping at our ankles. I held on to the girl I had loved since second grade as she shuddered back to life. It was the longest I had held her since our sixth-grade dance. We were silent and animal, gasping the air like it might run out. I almost didn’t want to think of Anne, but with Katie in my arms, heaving breath and thrilling on life, she was my only reference. A white dog ran out of the trees, stopped for a moment to look at us, then turned and ran back into the cover.

IT WAS AFTER
dark. A string of large bare bulbs hung low across the back porch. It smelled like mud and cut grass. Insects whirred unseen in the space around us. Paige had come home from the co-op with cod and potatoes and cherry tomatoes and olives and found us in the bathroom, Katie naked in the bathtub, vomiting into a large empty coffee can. I explained what had happened and found myself glad that I was still soaking wet at the time. Otherwise, I had the brief feeling that Paige wouldn’t have believed me, as if I had engineered something untoward. She sat on the floor and administered soft caresses with some secret female tenderness that I could never have summoned appropriately. We ate the cod in the kitchen, standing around the heavy, ancient, and chipped wooden chopping block, Katie laughing everything off.

Afterwards we moved to the porch, drinking from a sweating bottle of cheap, sweet champagne, the kind Anne would have hated.

“I shouldn’t have gotten us into that boat,” I said.

“You didn’t get us in there,” Katie said.

“I’m the one that said it would be safe.”

“That’s not why I got in.”

“I should have checked it.”

Katie turned to Paige and said, “He used to never do anything like that.”

“You mean almost kill you?” I said.

“You
saved
me.”