Man Camp (4 page)

The house warms quickly and they grill a London broil over the stove and bury two tinfoil-wrapped potatoes deep in the hot coals. They open a second bottle of wine and get slightly drunk as they feed each other dinner.

Before going to bed, they decide to brave the outhouse together, and though Adam did remember to bring the flashlight, he forgot to check the batteries, which are all but dead. The light casts no beam, making it useful only as a glow stick to announce their whereabouts to any hungry animals lurking in the dark. They huddle close together and trudge across the lawn, sinking shin-deep into the snow, neither admitting to being scared.

“Ladies first,” Adam says, standing guard while Lucy ventures in.

The door shuts behind her and the outhouse—a glorified shed, really—is pitch-black inside. Lucy imagines this might be a blessing, but it takes considerable willpower to pull down her pants and perch above what she knows is a numbingly cold seat. She shuts her eyes and concentrates by humming softly to herself. The wind howls and she hears branches snapping under the weight of the snow outside. Then she hears a louder sound, a
thunk,
and without warning, the door swings open and Adam leaps inside with her, stepping on her foot before landing solidly on his own.

“Jesus!” she says, standing and yanking up her pants.

“Sorry. Sorry.” He turns his back to her.

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s something out there. I heard it in the woods.” Adam’s breathing is shallow and fast, and Lucy strains to hear what he’s heard. All is quiet.

“Maybe it was just a big limb that fell,” Lucy says, inching toward the door. “It’s wet, heavy snow, that’s for sure.”

“Jesus, Lucy, it wasn’t snow. Something’s out there.”

Lucy pushes open the door a crack, sees nothing. “Well, whatever it was, it’s gone now. Want me to wait outside while you go?”

“Out there? Alone? Don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t really have to go anyway. Let’s just get back to the house.”

Adam steps in front of Lucy and sticks his head out the door, shining the dim flashlight into the darkness. He looks both ways before sprinting back to the farmhouse, not realizing Lucy isn’t by his side until he reaches the front door. He waves for her to hurry up, but Lucy can’t see him in the dark and walks back at her own pace.

“I really did hear something,” he says when she gets to the door.

“I know you did, honey.”

Adam locks the door behind them and announces that he’s going to bed. He climbs onto the futon without undressing and lies on his side, facing away from her. He closes his eyes and, in a few minutes, is fast asleep. Or pretending to be.

Lucy slowly takes off her shirt and swings it over the pitchfork. Surely Adam is joking. She wriggles out of her jeans, unhooks her bra, and peels off her underwear, tossing it onto the bed. Nothing! Could he really be asleep? She can’t decide whether to be mad or hurt, and slides under the covers beside him. She stares at the back of his neck where hair sprouts out from under his T-shirt and concentrates on how much she hates back hair.

Lucy wakes up early, cold and with a full bladder. Adam’s head is partly under a pillow and he’s pulled most of the blankets off her during the night. She slips into her long johns and tries to start a fire, crinkling up the sports section into neat balls and placing it on top of last night’s ashes. She tosses on some kindling and three logs, which she arranges tepee-style, and soon the fire catches. She puts on a pot of water for coffee.

Still asleep, Adam looks angelic in the twisted sheets, and Lucy vows to make this a better day. One of his feet sticks out and she covers it with the blanket.

Adam stirs. “Morning,” he says.

“Happy Valentine’s Day.”

“You too. Sleep okay?”

She nods. “You?”

“Pretty well.”

“I’m going to the outhouse. How about some coffee and a cuddle when I get back?”

“Sounds good. Want company?”

“I’ll be fine,” Lucy says.

Adam’s smile vanishes and he rolls over onto his stomach.

When she returns, he’s sitting on top of the folded-up bed.

“What about my coffee and cuddle?”

Adam hands her a Dundee mug full of hot coffee and pats the spot next to him on the sofa, as if being beside him is cuddle enough. His notebook is opened to a page of scribbled equations.

“Hey, no work on Valentine’s Day,” Lucy says, prying the notebook from his hands.

Adam looks perplexed. “Brain not warmed up. Need numbers to function.”

“I’ll give you numbers,” Lucy says, raking her fingers through her blond hair. “I’m going to teach you Valentine’s Day math. One.” She kisses him on the mouth once. “Two.” Both eyelids. “Three.” Cheek, nose, cheek. “Three times three.” Nine rapidfire kisses down his chest. “Warmed up yet?”

“Maybe a little,” Adam says, coming around. “But you know I left simple arithmetic thirty years ago. I need the kiss equivalent of quantum chromodynamics.”

“I can do that,” Lucy says. And she does.

It’s almost noon when they finish their breakfast and Lucy suggests that Adam find the well. They need to hook up the hoses to wash the dishes and themselves. He puts on his peacoat and dutifully trudges up the path with the Wolfs’ directions in hand. He’s gone for twenty minutes before Lucy pulls on her boots and ventures out after him, following his tracks into the woods and shouting his name.

“Over here,” he calls back.

Lucy walks up a small hill toward his voice and finds Adam kneeling in the snow beside the well, which is partially covered by a piece of plywood. His gloves are off and his bare hands are red from the cold. He holds the hose in one hand and pours well water into it with the other, trying to create the vacuum needed to activate the siphon system, but it’s not working.

“What’s the matter?” Lucy asks.

Adam points to his leg, which is soaked. “I slipped when I was lifting off the plywood.”

“Oh, honey.”

“And I can’t get this bloody thing to start.” He lifts the end of the hose higher.

“You must be freezing,” Lucy says, taking the hose and jug from his hands. “Why don’t you let me take a stab at this and you go back to the house. If I can’t do it, I’ll be right behind you.” She reads the handwritten instructions, which lie on a rock, and pours water into the funnel. As it gurgles into the hose, she plunges the end deep into the slushy well, which she desperately hopes will cause gravity to suck the water down the hill to the house.

Adam’s hardly walked twenty feet by the time Lucy has the siphon system up and running. “You must have primed it for me,” she says to him, as if he’d loosened the lid on a jelly jar. They don’t say a word to each other as they walk down the hill; the snow is loud beneath their feet.

Back inside, Adam removes his wet jeans and long underwear, hanging them over the stovepipe to dry. His legs are skinny and goose-pimply, and he looks like an uncooked chicken, his penis dangling along his right thigh. He stands in front of the fire, now mostly orange embers, to warm up.

“I’m afraid that’s the last of the chopped wood,” Lucy says, scanning the Wolfs’ note for the part about firewood, which she reads aloud: “ ‘Partially chopped tree in back. Use sledgehammer and wedge in corner by front door to split.’ ”

Adam pulls on a dry pair of boxers and jeans and grabs the sledgehammer and wedge. For weeks his back has been giving him trouble and he struggles to close the door behind him with his hands full of the heavy equipment.

Lucy turns on the faucet, and icy-cold water sputters into the basin. She fills a large kettle with enough water to do the dishes and lugs it to the stove to warm. When she returns to the sink, she looks out the window and watches Adam line up a couple of large logs to split. She loves the idea of him chopping wood and anticipates the delicious
thwack!
of the logs splitting.

Hunched over, Adam tentatively
tap tap taps
the wedge into the flesh of the wood until it’s in far enough to stand on its own. It occurs to Lucy that Adam has never split a log before. He grew up in New York City, after all, with parents in academia, and she can’t imagine that they’d teach their son such a thing. He lifts the sledgehammer, props it on his right shoulder, and lets it fall onto the wedge. It makes a high-pitched, delicate
ping
sound. He does this again and again.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
The wedge doesn’t progress any farther into the wood. Adam glances over his shoulder toward the house.

Busted, Lucy thinks, though she’s not sure he can see her. She stares down into the sink full of dishes and waits a moment before she looks up, this time keeping her head tilted down. Adam raises the sledgehammer again, higher this time, way up over his head, and Lucy holds her breath as he swings it down hard, using muscle to add momentum to gravity. There’s a loud metal-hitting-metal sound, but the hammer lands slightly in front of its target, clipping the outer lip of the wedge instead of striking it dead-on. The wedge shoots back and hits Adam squarely in the shin.

Adam yelps in pain and Lucy runs outside.

“Fuck!” Adam shouts, hopping on his right leg, holding his left in both hands. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Lucy supports him under one shoulder and helps him hobble back inside.

“Fuck.”

She sits him down on the futon, takes off his boot, and rolls up his pant leg to unveil an ugly purple lump the size of a large egg. She runs outside and pats some snow into a disk shape, which she covers in a towel and applies to his injury.

“Fuck.”

“What can I do, Adam?”

His look tells her she’s done enough already.

“Adam?”

He can’t even speak to her yet, he’s too angry from the pain, and she can tell that he blames her for his bruised shin—for the whole miserable trip.

“I want to leave,” Adam finally says. “I don’t want to discuss it. I don’t want to feel bad about it. I’ve just had enough and I want to go home.”

While Adam tends his wound in front of the fire, Lucy packs and cleans: She finishes the dishes, unhooks and drains the hose, locks the outhouse, and throws their clothes into bags, which she lugs out to the car and tosses in the backseat. She hops into the driver’s seat and turns the key, but the engine won’t start. She gets out and looks around: The trunk is ajar.

Back in the house, Adam is anesthetizing himself with the last of the wine and looks content with his notebook opened on his lap, absorbed with an equation.

Lucy’s mouth tastes sour. “The battery’s dead,” she says. “The trunk was open.”

Both of them know who left it that way.

“I’m going to walk to the nearest neighbor and see if they can give us a jump,” Lucy says.

To his credit, Adam is waiting outside when Lucy returns. She’s in the passenger’s seat of a rusted-out Chevy pickup truck, driven by a man who looks to be in his seventies, wearing a baseball cap and a smile that reveals a gleaming set of dentures.

The man whistles slightly when he speaks. “Only too happy to help a friend of the Wolfs,” he says, enjoying the opportunity to rescue city folk. Grabbing the jumper cables from behind his seat, he instructs Lucy to get into the rental car. “Pop the hood for us and when your husband gives you the signal, start the engine. You’ll want to give it a little gas, but not too much.”

I know how to jump-start a car,
Lucy thinks.
And he’s not my husband!
She’s suddenly flooded with relief that she and Adam are not married. She gets out of the pickup and, without meeting Adam’s gaze, sits in the driver’s seat of the rental car.

The old man pops his hood and greets Adam with a neighborly “Hello.” He attaches one end of the cable to his truck’s battery and hands the other to Adam, who holds a clamp in each hand and looks bewildered.

Misunderstanding Adam’s confusion for marital distress, the old man pats him on the back. “She a little teed off about this, eh? Don’t worry, we’ll have it fixed in a jiffy.” He gets back into the truck. “Okay,” he calls out. “Hook her up and tell me when!”

From the driver’s seat of the car, Lucy watches Adam through the gap between the two raised hoods. He’s staring blankly at the engine, clearly not knowing how to attach the clamps.
Right
out of the Boy Scout manual, my ass!
she thinks, furious at Cooper now, too, with all his Yankee-girls-need-to-let-men-be-men crap.

Under normal circumstances, Lucy would try to figure out a way to help Adam without letting him know that she’s helping him. But these circumstances are far from normal. She gets out of the car, snatches the jumper cables from him, and tells him to get behind the wheel. Then she clamps the red end to the positive terminal of the battery and the black end to the engine block, and says, “Okay. Now!” to signal the men to start the cars. Adam revs the engine. A few minutes later, she removes the cables in reverse order, looping them around her elbow and wrist, and returns them to the Wolfs’ neighbor in a neat coil.

They are halfway home before Adam speaks. “I’m sorry, Lucy. There’s nothing I hate more than disappointing you.”

Lucy says nothing.

It’s a long ride back to the city.

CHAPTER 4

“The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things.”

Jilly Cooper

MONDAY NIGHT — KURT BECKER

Martha’s FirstDate client Kurt Becker waits for her at the bar of Mare, a celebrity-chef-owned restaurant that’s been getting a lot of buzz. When she arrives, only ten minutes late, he greets her with a firm handshake and plenty of eye contact. “It’s nice to meet you, Ms. McKenna,” he says stiffly. “How do you do?”

“I’m
terrific,
” she says. “Call me Martha.” Following his greeting, she wonders if hers seems too exuberant, but she’s just come from a voice-over audition that turned into a job on the spot, the first acting gig she’s had in weeks.

“A voice-over?” Kurt says with uncertainty.

“Voice-overs are to actors what mole removals are to dermatologists. Not glamorous, but necessary. They pay the bills.” Lowering her voice, she adds, “The truth is, I’m not the pickiest thespian,” and laughs at the thought of how many times that afternoon she’d been made to repeat the line “It takes grease out of your way” under the grave direction of an ad exec who advised her to sound more grateful to the product.

Kurt seems taken aback by Martha’s gusto, as if it’s at odds with the earnest mood he’s trying to establish. He laughs awkwardly, and Martha decides to follow his lead and tone down her enthusiasm. He hands her a small yellow-pink rose, the stem of which is wrapped in a moist paper towel and covered in aluminum foil. “I grew it in my hothouse,” he says, and attributes his green thumb to his family’s Norwegian-bachelor-farmer roots. “I’m experimenting with heirloom roses.”

Kurt looks to be in his early forties and Martha finds him unnervingly handsome, with dark blond hair, cool gray eyes, and gleaming white teeth. She lifts the flower to her nose and for a moment forgets Kurt is not a real date and hasn’t grown the rose with the real Martha in mind. She closes her eyes and gets lost in the delicate fragrance of the flower.

Kurt clears his throat. “You still with me, Martha? Or am I talking to myself here?”

Martha’s eyes pop open.
You’re on a job,
she reminds herself,
and your client wants his money’s worth of your attention.
“Sorry,” she says, noticing that when Kurt’s handsome face isn’t smiling, there’s something hard about his mouth and a vein in his forehead promises to bulge when he becomes angry. He has style—always tough to detect in conventional business attire, but discernible to Martha, who’s attentive to the subtle wit of tie selection, the play of checks on stripes, the daring vocabulary of collars. She starts to wonder why he hired her—he seems to be a fairly capable dater—and launches into her rote FirstDate questions: “What do you hope to get from this experience?” “How did you hear about FirstDate?” “What do you believe are your dating issues?”

Unlike most of her clients, Kurt is ready with answers. “At the risk of sounding arrogant,” he starts right in, “I think I’m a decent catch.” He ticks off his attributes one finger at a time until his palms are open, all ten fingers extended: “I’m intelligent, healthy, financially secure,
well
educated,
well
traveled,
well
read—”

Well, well, well, Martha thinks, assuming he’s joking.

“—a fine cook, sophisticated, in excellent shape, and shall we say, not horrendously unattractive.”

He’s not joking.

“Basically,” he continues, “I can offer the right woman a pretty good life.” His pretty good life includes a house in the country, a fifty-foot schooner, a four-story brownstone on Gramercy Park, and his own plane. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable that I expect the woman I end up with to have a lot to offer, too.” His look asks a rhetorical
Do you?

Martha’s look doesn’t have an answer. But she does find it odd, even if Kurt’s fine qualities don’t include her personal favorites—warmth and humor—that he hasn’t landed someone who likes what he offers enough to stick around. She wonders if he might not be one of those men who wants a woman’s love, only to become contemptuous when he gets it; one of the if-you-love-me-then-something-must-be-wrong-with-you types. Kurt’s face doesn’t look so handsome anymore.

Then his list begins: “The right woman must be intelligent, beautiful, athletic, and a lover of the arts.” He goes on to say that money isn’t a requirement per se, but an impressive academic record and some level of career success are. “Above all, she can’t require a lot of coddling. I need a woman who can hold her own at a business dinner.” He pauses and gives Martha a guilty look, perhaps realizing he sounds emotionless. “I’m a real sucker for sad eyes.”

Sad eyes? Aren’t they usually part of a larger, sad person?
Martha wonders.

Mental note: Lose the list.

“Mostly, the woman I’m with needs to understand the pressure I’m under,” Kurt says with an urgency that suggests he needs Martha to understand. “I work in a
war zone.
People are being obliterated out there. They’re dead before they know what’s hit them. That’s what it’s like in my business every day.” He takes a sip of his drink, a double scotch on the rocks. “When I get home, the last thing I need is someone desperate to rehash my day. I need peace.”

Martha can’t believe that she’s blanked on such a major piece of information in his bio. She wishes she could light up a cigarette. “What is it you do again, Kurt?” she asks in her mother’s calmest flight-attendant voice.
Trauma surgeon? Al Qaeda–cell infil-trator? Mob informant?
She can’t recall.

“I run a software company,” he answers.

Martha quells the urge to laugh and reaches for her napkin.

“Do you have any idea what’s been happening in the software industry in the last few years?” he asks incredulously. “It’s been decimated. We’re dodging bullets.”

“Uh-huh.” Martha leans back in her chair.

Kurt takes a breath, relaxes his shoulders, and smiles. He turns handsome again. He takes her in, not in a lewd way, but in the way that a man does when he’s letting a woman know he finds her attractive. “Enough about my work,” he says, allowing his voice to become softer. “Let’s get down to romantic business.”

Encouraged that he’s trying to lighten the mood, Martha smiles back.

“The right woman for me is slender, above five-five, and under thirty-five . . .” He pauses for a moment as if to gauge if he’s unintentionally insulted his date. “. . . so she isn’t in too much of a rush to get married and have children.”

“Do you feel pressure to get married?” Martha asks.

Kurt adjusts himself in his chair. “Are you always so direct?”

“Pretty much,” she answers, though if it were a real date, she knows she’d never have asked the question.

“My motto with women is to take it one day at a time.”

That’s the Alcoholics Anonymous slogan, too,
thinks Martha. “Let’s forget about who you want to date and focus on your skills as a dater,” she suggests.

Kurt’s forehead vein swells a little. “I was only informing you of my minimum standards. I know you’re not a match-maker. You’re a dating
expert.
” His emphasis on the word
expert
somehow makes it mean the opposite. “It’s not as if I don’t know how to treat women.”

I didn’t hire me,
thinks Martha,
you did!
But still, she wishes she hadn’t made Kurt feel defensive. He brings to mind her first foray into psychoanalysis when she was twenty-four. Her goal then was to be declared problem- and neurosis-free, to be told by her shrink that she was wonderfully sane, amusing, talented, and well adjusted. She realizes that’s how Kurt is approaching FirstDate, with the goal of being declared a perfect date.

“How about we just try to figure out some new romantic approaches for you?” she says and tries to come up with an appropriate war metaphor that will bring him around, but all that comes to mind is
Damn the torpedos! Full speed ahead,
which seems more like advice for herself. She opts for a sports cliché instead: “Kurt, we’re on the same team here.”

It turns out that Kurt speaks Sports as well as War. “All’s forgiven,” he says, smiling. “Ready for dinner?”

Forgiven?
thinks Martha, slightly rankled.

Kurt signals the tuxedoed maître d’ and they’re escorted from the bar to a lovely table, secluded in a corner. Kurt gently pulls the chair out for Martha. “Just because this isn’t a real date doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t make you feel as special as I would any woman.”

Martha wonders if he’s aware of exactly how unspecial saying that would make
any
woman feel.

A waiter rushes over and places a dozen long-stemmed yellow roses on the table, another brings a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and yet another sets up a bucket of ice. “The world has been very kind to me,” Kurt says, elaborating on his trust fund, his Nantucket home, his racing schooner.

When menus don’t arrive after twenty minutes, Kurt is compelled to explain that he’s taken the liberty of ordering them both the chef’s carte du jour.

Mental note: Even if your compulsive list-making has successfully
weeded out 95 percent of the female population, you never, ever presume to
order for a woman on a first date.

Over their six-course meal, Kurt tells stories in which he quotes people quoting him, makes elaborate displays of wine tasting, and sends back his filet mignon for being overcooked to medium. “When you spend this much on a meal, you expect perfection,” he explains smugly.

And throughout all of it, Martha does what Martha does best: She watches. She studies her date’s behavior and tries to enjoy herself. After dessert, she excuses herself, goes to the bathroom, and scribbles notes in a tiny notebook:
Don’t brag about
being rich, just spare no expense at dinner. Don’t boast about your fitness, let
me admire your physique. Don’t list your academic credentials, dazzle me
with your wit.
She looks at herself in the bathroom mirror, noting that she’s over thirty-five, has happy eyes, and might even be good for a man like Kurt. She opens her notebook again.
Your
list of requirements for a mate is a recipe for staying single: It rules people
out. A better way to find the right woman is to be open to her, whoever
she is.

TUESDAY NIGHT — CHARLES FRINGER

Charles leaves a message on Martha’s voice mail canceling their dinner date just a few hours before they’re supposed to meet. He tells her machine that his weekly meeting has been switched to Tuesdays and he never misses them. Can they reschedule?

Weekly meeting? What could it be?
Martha wonders.
His parole
officer? Anger management? Dinner with mom? Group therapy?

WEDNESDAY NIGHT — WALTER SHERMAN

Martha is her usual ten minutes late, but Walter Sherman arrives even later, pecking away at the buttons on his BlackBerry. When he finally looks up, he’s unable to find his date among all the leggy starlets who hang out at Bellisima, the Soho hot spot where he suggested they meet. Models and models-in-the-making lean against columns and drape themselves over the stools, crossing and uncrossing their long legs, wrapping and unwrapping their willowy arms around their slender selves. Walter’s eyes move from one woman to the next, lingering over their lithe bodies, until at last they land on someone who is actually looking back at him.

Martha?
he mouths.

She nods,
yes.
Despite being dwarfed by two statuesque beauties, Martha holds her own at the bar in a red silk blouse, black skirt, and sleek black boots.

He raises an apologetic, just-one-more-minute finger and continues punching buttons.

Martha orders a Chardonnay, which arrives in a thimble-size glass. She downs it in two swallows.

At thirty-four, Walter has not quite grown into his body and the words
overgrown puppy
pop into Martha’s head. He has a jowly, droopy face, big ears, and rounded shoulders that hunch over a soft middle. He pads toward Martha, still clutching his BlackBerry like a favorite chew toy, and apologizes, offering his free hand to her, his left, and they endure one of those handholdy greetings usually reserved for the aged. Martha releases first.

“It was a work thing,” he says, placing the device in his pocket and nodding as if they both understand that he had no choice. “I think I might have mentioned that I’m a producer for the
NBC Nightly News,
” he says anchorman-style, catching his reflection in the mirror behind the bar and smiling. “The news doesn’t stop just because I’m having a drink with a pretty girl.”

His BlackBerry makes a delayed
ding-dong
powering-off sound and it occurs to Martha that he might have been playing a game.

“I guess everyone knows how crazy the news business is,” he says.

Martha has never been in a newsroom and braces herself for a Kurt-style onslaught of war metaphors.