It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories (19 page)

She stayed in the house all December and January, though I barely glimpsed her. Arshin claimed Schuyler was living with her, sneaking up there at night and leaving first thing in the morning, but we saw no sign of him. In February we went on vacation. When we got back, there was a realtor’s board up outside the house. Faye had left abruptly—for Iowa, we heard later, where she had relatives—and Rick’s father had decided to sell the place. It sold quickly, to a couple from New York who wanted it for a weekend home.

A few days ago I met Cora Chastine coming down the road on her mare. We stopped to talk, and at some point I remarked how quiet Vanderbeck Hollow had become without Rick roaring up and down it in his truck. Cora looked blank for a moment, and I wondered if she was growing forgetful in her old age. But then, in that serene, melodious voice of hers, she said: “Do you know, I realized the other day, that Rick is the first person whose life I’ve observed in its entirety from birth to death, within my own lifetime? I was living here when he was born, and I’m still living here now that he’s no longer alive. Isn’t that remarkable?”

I nodded politely. She gave the reins a little flick and glided on.

I’d been planning to take just my usual late-afternoon walk to the top of the road and back, but something was making me restless; some faint sense of shame, no doubt, at having failed to protest that Rick’s existence might be regarded as something other than merely the index of this genteel horsewoman’s powers of survival, and instead of turning back I continued along the logging trail that leads from the end of the road up through the woods to the ridge.

It was years since I’d been up there. The trail was muddy and puddled from the late thaw, but the service blossoms were out, ragged stars, and the budding leaves on the maples and oaks made high domes through which the last of the daylight glowed in different shades of green. Reaching the top of the ridge, I followed the path down the far side, past the rusted swing gate with its state land sign and on down the uninhabited slope that faces north across Spruce Hollow.

The trees here were different: hemlocks and pines, with some kind of dark-leaved shrub growing between them, its leaf crown held up on thin, bare, twisting gray stems like strange goblets. It took me a moment to recognize this as mountain laurel—deer must have stripped it below shoulder level, causing this eerie appearance—and I was just trying to remember the things Rick had told me about this plant the time we walked up through the woods together when my eye was caught by a straight-edged patch of darkness off in the distance, and I realized, peering through the tangled undergrowth, that I was looking at a man-made structure.

Leaving the path, I made my way toward it, and saw that it was a hut built out of logs. It stood in a small clearing. The walls were about five feet high, the peeled logs neatly notched into each other at the corners. The roof had been draped with wire-bound bundles of brush. A door made of ax-hewn planks hung in the entrance. I pushed this; it swung open onto a twilit space in which, by whatever swift chain reaction of stimulus and remembrance, I became abruptly aware that I was standing in the cabin that Rick had built himself in order to have, as he had put it, “somewhere to go.”

The top few inches of the rear wall had been left open under the eaves, giving a thin view of Spruce Clove. On the dirt floor below stood a seat carved out of a pine stump, with a plank shelf fitted at waist height into the wall beside it. An unopened can of Molson stood on this, and next to that what looked like an improvised clay ashtray.

I sat on the stump, struck by the thought that this would make a good refuge from the world if I too should ever feel the need for “somewhere to go.” And then, as I was sizing up the shelf for possible use as a desk, I saw that what I’d thought was an ashtray was not in fact an ashtray at all. I picked it up; it was a piece of dried clay that had been hollowed by the imprint of an enormous, clawed paw.

A sudden apprehension traveled through me. Despite a strong impulse to swing around, I stopped myself; I dislike giving way to superstition. Even so, as I sat there gazing up at the granite outcrops of Spruce Clove, streaked in evening gold, I had an almost overpowering sense of being looked at myself; stared at in uncomprehending astonishment by some wild creature standing in the doorway.

“What will I do? Keep looking, I suppose.”

Lev Rosenberg remained stooped as he spoke to his wife, his eye pressed to the lens of the squat sixteen-inch telescope pointing through the small dome of the observatory.

It was a chilly, glittering October night. As Lev inched the telescope across the heavens, his wife could see faint showers of magnified starlight spark in the translucent part of his iris. The grounds of the college and the farmland beyond were visible through the open slot in the dome, familiar contours spectral in the bright moonlight. Frost was already glinting on the stiffened milkweed pods at the base of the observatory.

“Not that a fifty-four-year-old physicist who hasn’t revised relativity is exactly a hot commodity on the market right now. As we seem to be discovering.”

Bryony, Lev’s wife, said nothing.

“Don’t we?”

“I guess.”

Last summer the college had fired eighteen professors, Lev among them. Only two so far had found jobs elsewhere. A few others had drifted off. Most of the dozen or so who remained owned

homes in the area, with mortgages to pay, families to support. In a few months the severance money would run out. Then what? Were they going to have to sell their houses? Take their children out of college?

As a courtesy, Lev had been permitted to go on using the observatory. He came most nights; it seemed to be good for his morale. Tonight Saturn was rising in Pisces at an unusual angle to Earth, and Lev had brought Bryony with him to show her.

“You’re not cold, are you?”

“I’m okay.”

“Don’t want the little fellows catching a chill. Can you catch a chill in the womb?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ah . . . There he is. There’s Saturn. Come. Come have a look . . .”

Lev turned from the lens and smiled at his wife. His yellowish gray eyes were watering with the cold. Silver hairs shone in his black beard, which he had grown since being fired.

He stood back and made way for his wife at the eyepiece.

“That’s a sight to put our little problems in perspective.”

Lev had come to Shalehaven twelve years earlier from the Soviet Union. At the time of his arrival the college had been prosperous, hospitable to exiles like him. In those days it was prestigious to have a dissident on campus, and the college had shown its appreciation by building a small observatory to Lev’s specifications. It was here that his relationship with Bryony had begun.

She was his student then, sixteen years his junior, tall—taller than Lev—with a reticent self-possession he had found beguiling. She’d stayed on at the college during the summer vacation of her senior year to write her thesis. As darkness fell on the warm evenings, she would make her way over to the observatory to record the positions of the star cluster she was studying. Lev would be there, writing or reading in his office downstairs. He would offer her a drink—not such a scandalous thing in those days—and they would talk, before going upstairs to look at the star cluster.

Toward the end of the summer their conversation had begun to take on a more personal tone. Lev told Bryony about his arrest for distributing censored pamphlets, describing the labor camp in Siberia where he’d built railbeds for a bauxite mine till he collapsed with a heart attack, aged thirty-seven. He told her about his years in internal exile in Tomsk, where he’d been caretaker of one of the old merchant buildings. He showed her a photo of the gray wooden building with its carved eaves and confided that he had been happier there than anywhere else in his life. “Until now. But you tell me about your life.” She spoke about her parents, both doctors in Maine; her brother, a naval cadet; the year they had all spent at a reservation clinic in Alaska . . . “Not much to tell, really,” but in the strangeness of Lev’s new existence, the ordinariness of this calm young woman’s life had had a powerful effect on him. They had first kissed up in the observatory, the smell of freshly carpentered lutaber mingling with the faint soap scent of Bryony’s skin and the sweetish tobacco fragrance from Lev’s Tekel cigarettes, the air outside full of silvery spindrift from the milkweed pods that had ripened and begun to split. Even today Lev couldn’t climb the braided metal steps to the dome without recalling the feelings of tumultuous affection those evenings had stirred in him.

Bryony peered into the eyepiece of the telescope. There, aswim in its powdery blackness, was the bright glow of Saturn, its rings edge on to Earth like a hatbrim seen at eye level.

“Pretty sensational, don’t you think?”

“Yes . .

“Hm.”

Lev sighed.

“It is sensational, Lev.”

There was a silence. They could hear the low hum of the telescope’s clock drive as it tracked the sky.

“Bloody Dieter,” Lev muttered.

“Lev, it’ll be all right. Something else will come up.”

A couple of months ago Lev’s old friend Dieter Kaufmann had called to say there was a position in his department down in Texas. Lev had applied formally and been chosen as one of three finalists for the job. A week ago he’d flown down for an interview. Today Dieter had called to tell him he hadn’t gotten the job.

“Dieter tries to console me by telling me the job’s not senior enough for someone of my standing anyway. What do you think about that?”

“I suppose that means they want someone younger.” “Precisely. Ha! At least I can rely on one person not to mince her words.”

“They probably want a woman too, Lev. You know what it’s like. Or someone from a minority group. Or both.”

“Yes, yes. Well, I’ve always been in favor of that.”

Bryony straightened up.

“You have another look, Lev. It’s already moving out of view.” Lev caught a look in her eye as he changed places with her. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

He gazed at her a moment. The supple skin over the delicate bones in her face seemed almost fluid in the moonlight, like glass-ily clear water over smooth rocks. She was still almost painfully dear to him.

“Are you worrying about me?”

“Well—”

“Don’t. I’ve survived worse than this.”

“Yes.”

He kissed her lightly on the lips, then reapplied his eye to the lens.

“Anyway, I told Dieter the news.”

“What news, Lev?”

“About the little fellows. What else?”

“I thought we weren’t going to tell anybody yet.”

“Well... I wanted to say something a little bit human. Otherwise the conversation was getting so formal. . .”

A few years ago they had tried to have a child, without success. A brief foray into reproductive therapy—Clomid, Pergonal, intrauterine insemination—had left them jarred and repulsed, and they had let the matter drop. But after the firings, Lev had suddenly decided he wanted to try again.

“I’m fifty-four,” he’d said. “I’ll be an old man soon. You’ll go off with someone else, but at least if we have a kid together, you’ll stay in touch.”

“I’m not going off with anybody,” Bryony had told him quietly.

But there was also the practical consideration that the college medical insurance would pay for some of the treatment, and they could stay on the plan for only a limited period.

This time, therefore, they had stuck it out. Bryony had gone back on the drugs. They made her ovulate prodigiously, and the surgeon had been able to cut out ten eggs. She submitted to this in a state of dreamy, half-fascinated passivity The surgeon mixed the eggs with Lev’s sperm and put three of them back inside Bryony. Two had fertilized. These were what Lev referred to as the “little fellows.”

“Perhaps we should go back in the house,” Lev said, still looking through the lens. “No sense in taking a risk.”

“No . . . Let’s stay here. I want to stay here.”

“All right. Let’s see what else I can find for you. I’m never sure how interested you are anymore . . .”

“I am interested, Lev—”

It was true, though; her own tender, almost shy interest in astronomy had become all but invisible, even to herself, in the glare of Lev’s passion for the subject. Despite Lev’s urgings to the contrary, she had long ago given up the idea of pursuing it professionally. In her vague way, she had come to think of Lev as being interested enough for the both of them.

She gazed out through the slot at the monochrome landscape. There was the carved white spire of the Shalehaven Unitarian church. A light was on in the house next to it. That would be Paula Kitson, who had also lost her job in the firings. The last time Bryony had run into her, Paula had told her a strange, rambling story. She had gone into town to buy groceries. When she came back, she had seen a bag on the table in her kitchen. The bag was exactly the same as the one she was carrying. Inside it were exactly the same groceries. “Can you believe it?” she’d said with a laugh. “I must have already been to the store and just totally zoned out.”