Man in The Woods (7 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Ruby has once again attempted to get the dog to sleep in her bedroom. Though she normally is reluctant to close her door at night, now she shuts it tight, hoping to frustrate the dog’s ability to escape. Nevertheless, Shep comes walking down the twenty-step staircase. By day he is full of energy, but at night his steps are cautious, mincing.

“Uh-oh, look who’s here,” Kate says, as the dog makes his way into the living room, where Paul is crouched in front of the fireplace, jabbing at a couple of hissing locust logs with the fireplace poker in a way that to Kate always seems random and a little angry, but which is generally effective. Sure enough, the flames open into full bloom and the smoke, which had been curling out over the edge of the hearth, is now rushing up the flue and out the chimney.

“Hello there buddy,” he says. Instead of rising from his crouch, Paul sits down on the hooked rug in front of the hearth, and Shep, his head bowed in an elaborate show of deference, comes to Paul’s side.

“How did you ever exist before you found this dog?” Kate asks.

She has brought a pot of tea and a plate of sliced apples out to the living room. There is an air of discomfort and irony when Kate performs domestic duties. “I forgot sugar,” she says.

“Just as well,” says Paul. “The apples are sweet.” He scrambles to his feet, picks up a thin, nearly translucent apple slice, and holds it up to the firelight. “You cut these so beautifully.”

Kate looks at him oddly. “You compliment me about the weirdest little things. You tell me how neat my purse is. You’re really reaching, trying to come up with
something
.”

Paul continues to inspect the apple. “Beautifully cut, one cut and one cut only. Am I right? No hesitation.”

“Yes, I’m really quite amazing,” Kate says. “You really lucked out with me.” She hands him the tea in a black-and-gold mug bearing the title of her book, just one of the promotional items her publisher and bookstores have made on her book’s behalf—T-shirts, water glasses, a vase, a pious silk bookmark, a scarf, posters announcing her appearance at various bookstores, churches, art centers, and colleges, a monogrammed briefcase, pens, pencils, a cell phone holder—she even has a wristwatch, a gift from her publisher, with a picture of Kate on its face, the hour and the minute hands sometimes protruding from the sides of her nose like cat whiskers. She treats all these small souvenirs of success as if they were part of a joke, yet none of them are discarded. She can’t help it.

She sees that Paul’s eyes have settled on the mug. She shrugs, makes a comical face, and then grimaces. “How do you make tea again?” she says, laughing, putting the mug on the mantelpiece. She is wearing jeans, a turtleneck, and a knit cardigan. She plunges her hand into the sweater’s pocket. She occasionally finds a couple of stray candies in her pockets. Since stopping drinking, she craves sweets—in fact, all of her tastes and desires have become more vivid, and more urgent: salt, laughter, sex. She finds two foil-wrapped chocolates:
and some people say there is no God!

“I feel a little like we’re losing touch with each other,” she says. She sits on the sofa and pats the cushion next to her, beckoning Paul. He continues to fuss with the dog. “What did your insurance guy say about your truck?” Kate asks.

“I don’t know,” Paul says.

Kate considers this for a moment. It makes absolutely no sense to her—she knows he
has
auto insurance, and she knows his insurance agent, who is her insurance agent as well, speaks clearly and in English, and she also knows that no repairs have yet been made on Paul’s banged-up truck, nor has he seen a doctor about his array of bangs and bruises. She counsels herself:
let it pass
.

“How can you not know?” she asks. “Did you even call?”

“I’m just going to take care of it myself,” Paul says. “It was my fault anyhow.”

It sounds simple enough, but the mode of living and making decisions at the core of Paul’s statement is finally so at odds with Kate’s way of being in the world that, despite reminding herself again that here is a perfect example of something she can just as well let alone, something that does not need her participation or commentary, she finds herself saying, “But that’s what insurance is for, honey. Why would you make that kind of decision? I don’t get it.”

Paul takes a breath; even under better circumstances, it is often difficult for him to order his thoughts when it is time to present them. Even when he can bring his thoughts forward he has trouble sequencing them—he often sounds like a child to himself, interrupting himself with salient details he forgot to put in, and further interrupting himself with so many parenthetical thoughts that the implied parentheses burst open like soaking-wet paper sacks. The greater pity of it is that he knows what it is like to imagine himself eloquent, and to imagine his opinions and memories flowing out like a song as he spins out an anecdote about his youthful travels and travails, or about the extreme alpha-males he meets in the course of his work, but these songs remain unsung, buried and entombed beneath an avalanche of you-knows and nervous laughs. He can be articulate with children, with fellow carpenters, and with strangers. Kate is a different story altogether. As much as he loves her and feels confident in her feelings for him, he sometimes finds himself tongue-tied and stammering around her, and sometimes when he does say what he means to his voice is soft, flat, and bears, without his intention, a pattern of discouragement, in the way that parasites beneath the bark of a tree will create swirling designs in the wood.

Kate senses there is a reason Paul has not called the insurance agent about the truck. Her best guess is that he long ago forgot to pay his premium, or maybe he absentmindedly allowed his registration to lapse, and now would rather pay for the repairs himself or leave the truck as it is than face the consequences of his loosey-goosey lifestyle. It’s fine with her. There are enough punctual people in the world, enough bankers, and enough computer programmers—the people who might be escorting everyone to the apocalypse when their machines fail to recognize the end of the twentieth century at the end of next month.

No, Kate does not need for Paul to pay keener attention to worldly affairs, and she surely does not need for him to be more clever about money. She is making plenty of money now, and, really, in his own way, Paul seems to always find time for his high-end clients. Yes, every job takes much, much longer than he originally anticipates, but, in the end, he is always handsomely paid. What Kate needs from Paul is what Paul already supplies: his honesty, his beauty, his tenderness toward Ruby, and the passionate attention he pays to her.

She joins him on the floor, nuzzles closer, and gently but insistently pulls him down, so they are both lying in front of the fireplace, with the dozing dog between them and the flames. As she kisses his nose, his closed eyes, she thinks,
Who cares about insurance?
And then:
Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense if we were on the same policy?

“Hey,” she says. “You know what? We should get married.”

She sees what she hopes is merely surprise on his face. “You’re making me a little nervous,” she says.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to.”

“I just proposed and you look like I pulled a knife on you.”

Paul takes her in his arms, holds her close to comfort her and make her feel loved, and to relieve her from having to study his face for clues. He is bereft, abandoned: how can she not know he is a ruined man?

“My God,” Kate says, “your poor heart is pounding.”

“I’m fine.”

“You know what?” Kate extricates herself from his embrace. She clears her throat. “We don’t have to get married. Maybe we’ll just have a party, a big old party so everyone in Leyden can see us together and, you know, all the women can just be sick with envy that I’ve snagged the most desirable man in New York State.” She waits for him to say something. “We can do it on New Year’s Eve. Everyone needs a place to go on New Year’s Eve, especially this one, since the world is supposed to come to an end, and I can invite all my sober friends who need a place to go where there is plenty of seltzer and cranberry juice. We’ll have booze, and lots of chocolate. And smoking will be allowed because a few of my AA friends need to smoke—I think their self-image depends on having at least one horrible habit.”

She rolls onto her back and tucks her hands behind her head, and looks up at the ceiling. Reflected light from the fireplace dashes across the smooth white plaster. She is still waiting for Paul to say something—not necessarily about the proposal of marriage, or even the proposal of a party. She would just like him to say
something
.

Cold midnight. The moon is parked outside the bedroom window and Kate’s breathing buzzes richly, oddly soothing to Paul, though he would love to be asleep himself. He lifts his corner of the comforter and slips out of bed. The wooden wide-board floor is cold on his bare feet.

I did it
.

I ended a life
.

The night air moves through the room like black water. Paul steps back, stumbles on Shep, who has still not found a stable sleeping spot. The dog’s tail thumps on the floor. “Shhh, Sheppie, shhh,” Paul says, but the sound of Paul’s voice makes him wag his tail with more vigor and intensity. “All right, come on, let’s go,” Paul whispers, and the dog scrambles up noisily.

Kate and Paul’s bedroom is on the second floor; the house’s other substantial bedroom, Ruby’s, is at the other end of the landing. Between the bedrooms are three smaller rooms, including the garretlike one, with faded rose wallpaper, described once by the real estate saleswoman as the sewing room, and used by Kate as her office before Paul built her a real studio. Paul has now made it his own, where he stores his tool and fixtures catalogs, issues of architecture and home-decorating magazines in which his work has been featured, and where, with a sleek little computer Kate gave him a few months ago, he searches the Internet for materials. Whereas he was once confined to a hundred-mile radius to find old windows, barn boards, salvaged mantels, and old-growth lumber, now he has a nation-spanning network of contractors, carpenters, lumber brokers, hardware collectors, salvagers, rural archaeologists willing to sell anything from a steeple to a stall. He had even recently succumbed to an impulse buy of six 125-year-old ladders rescued from an abandoned apple orchard in Yakima, Washington, the wood as smooth and gray as fog, the length and taper so beautiful and so perfect and so deeply redolent of the past that it moved Paul practically to tears when he dismantled them to incorporate their parts in new construction.

He appreciates the sleek design of his computer, its compactness, its waste-free functionality, but, aside from the action of the keyboard and the hinges of the case, how his laptop actually
works
is mysterious to him. In his personal life, what brings him joy are animal pleasures—eating, drinking, sex, air, freedom. Most of what the world offers at the push of a button or the flick of a switch does not appeal to him.

The computer sits on a table his assistant, Evangeline Durand, gave him for his birthday two months ago, a trim four-by-three piece of white oak she had somehow planed and burnished without his noticing. Her card informed him that his birthday was once known in England as Royal Oak Day. She had fastened a sprig of oak to the card, and in her own calligraphy she copied a poem by John Evelyn, linking the oak tree to kingliness:

A rugged Seat of Wood became a Throne

Th’ obsequious Boughs his Canopy of State

With bowing Tops the Tree their King did own

And silently ador’d him as he sate.

“Are you sure she’s a lesbian?” Kate had said, when he showed her Evangeline’s present. She ran her palm over the smooth, waxed wood, and furrowed her brow. “I think you’re so used to women having crushes on you, you don’t even see it when it’s right in front of you.”

“She lives with a woman,” Paul said. “Who she calls her husband.”

“I don’t know,” Kate had persisted. “She wears that little pearl necklace to work.”

“Maybe from her husband,” Paul replied.

The computer has already taught him the difference between murder and manslaughter and that his crime, if he were to be tried for it and found guilty, as he surely would be, carries a sentence of somewhere between three and ten years, though by now he would probably be given the harshest sentence allowable—the law seems to hold a particular loathing for runners and hiders. Tonight Paul wants to find out anything he can about the man who died in the woods. He turns the computer on and cringes at the heartless chord it plays when it is powered up. Shep is next to him on the bare floor, sighing and snoring in an almost human way, snout resting on his front paws. The dog, this seventy-five pounds of consciousness, is the only part of the universe, except for the trees and the sky, that has seen what Paul can do when fury and instinct take the place of thought, and yet this dog seems to have bestowed his fealty upon him, totally and unshakably.