Off Course (20 page)

“I won't do it,” said Franny.

But she did, the next Thursday. Franny sang both songs again, plus she and Donna had worked out a duet, “Two More Bottles of Wine.” Donna's capable alto provided a good foil for Franny's sweet, stubborn plaintiveness.

*   *   *

The next storm brought another four feet of snow. Don Dare's tent semicollapsed, and until he could dig it out, he moved in with Freddy and River Bob in DeeDee's old place.

During the days, the cold was not severe; once you got moving, you could ski as long as you wanted wearing a sweatshirt with a down vest.

At night, with Quinn asleep beside her, Cress listened to distant choruses endlessly singing, at a very high pitch, right on the edge of hearing.

They kissed on the creaky wicker love seat, the kissing a form of daydreaming, where she floated amid bright images. The white world, the golden meadow, a granular spew of stars. They stripped each other, layer after layer. His skin was supple but coarse; older and vaguely hide-like, just beginning to loosen at his wrists, knees, and elbows. Without cologne, he smelled faintly of wood and some days, not unpleasantly, of engines. They gazed calmly and at length into each other's eyes, inhaled each other's breath. She sat on the back of his thighs and pushed her thumbs up the trough of his spine—he claimed never to have been massaged before! She sat the other way and dug into his calves and thighs. “Do you think, in some far distant future, we'll ever see each other again?” she asked. “Like when you're old and I'm still relatively young?”

“I'll come see you in my wheelchair.”

“And I'll tip you out of it. Onto my bed.”

*   *   *

Cress's father came up for a night, long enough to have a yelling match with Rick Garsh over the inspection; since Rick wrote the inspector a check, he charged Sam Hartley 10 percent on top of the inspection fee. Sam called Rick a chiseler, a cheat, and a phony, and refused to pay. Both sides now spoke openly of lawyers and lawsuits.

*   *   *

Sometimes she wished that Quinn would just leave. Leave and get it over with, so she could stop being afraid of being alone on the mountain and just be alone on the mountain. She couldn't begin to get over him if he was still here.

*   *   *

At Beech Creek, Dalia announced that banquets would pick up mid-April and get incredibly busy come May, with weddings and graduation parties. Cress could work as much as she liked, six or seven days a week. The money was there to be made. So this became her plan: once Quinn left, she would make her nut (a thousand dollars was her goal) and leave. Where, she didn't know. London, maybe.

Donna said, “Hey! Rent a room from me, so you don't have to drive up and down the mountain every day. A hundred bucks a month. A good deal for you and a big help to me.”

Cress hardly had to consider it. “Just don't tell Quinn. I don't want him to think that I followed him off the hill.”

*   *   *

“I'm going to miss your gloomy mug, Quinn, man,” Brian said at Family Night. “Now who's going to teach me how to use a router?”

“Cress can,” Quinn said. “She's a pro with that thing.”

At one point, when all the men had left the table—for the bathroom, the bar, the phone—Franny said, “Here's this, you guys,” and pulled a chain out of her blouse. On the chain dangled a yellow-gold diamond ring.

Donna grabbed it, squinted. “Jeez, girl, that's a honker.”

“Three carats,” said Franny. “He proposed at Estero Beach. I'm wearing it round my neck till we get it sized.”

Donna gave Cress a bright laughing look. “I knew it was going to happen, Franny. I told Cress just last week…”

“I wish you could be next, Cress,” Franny said softly. “I see how he looks at you—it's like Brian looks at me. Like he'd curl up 'n' die without you.”

*   *   *

Cress discreetly boxed up her woolens and hiking boots, her thrift-store ski pants. Her dissertation—or, full disclosure, two and a third chapters thereof—she filed in the box with her research notes. The Selectric went back in its case, and all of it went into the upstairs closet. She took an old plaid suitcase from the basement, filled it with Beech Creek uniforms and low-altitude clothes—jeans, T-shirts, light sweaters—and stowed it in the Saab's trunk.

Quinn finished her parents' cabin on a Wednesday. The next morning he cleaned and packed up his tools and secured the cupboards in the trailer. He and Cress skied for the last time to the meadows and the Bauer cabin.

The sky was an aching blue with two lenticular clouds, one large, one small, like enormous Frisbees tilted against the northern range. The sun was warm; they shed their sweatshirts and skied in T-shirts and open down vests. They pushed on, passing Don's tent, a hump in the snow, the fir ridgepole protruding like a bony elbow, and, deciding against a longer outing, turned back toward the lodge, where they stopped in for a drink—who cared what anyone thought now? The crowd was large for a late weekday afternoon, and a good-natured drunken hilarity gusted in loud laughter and shouts. Carpenters lined the bar, and a party of snowmobilers had pushed tables together; cross-country skiers dried their backsides at the fire. “Heya, Hartley!” Jakey yelled across the room from the register. “Your old boyfriend broke into the Mackenzie cabin last night, made a big damn mess! Kitchen looked like an eight-point earthquake—molasses, maple syrup, and pancake mix all over the floor.”

Cress, confused, tried to smile, but she was socked by sudden guilt: What old boyfriend? Who was Jakey talking about? Himself? Had she lost track of someone? She tried to sound light and game. “Which old boyfriend is this?”

“Big old black guy with the white snout. The one who won't stay in bed.”

“Oh, him!” She could've leaped with relief. “He's up again? Something's wrong. He's hungry all the time. Maybe he has worms.”

*   *   *

They gave each other the same present: a silver flask from the locked knife case at the Sparkville hardware store. “The man told me he'd just sold one, and this was his last,” said Cress. “Maybe it's a sign.”

Quinn squinted at his elongated reflection. “I don't believe in signs.”

He'd been intermittently gloomy and clingy all week. She'd been cooler, strict with herself. No fantasies of a future. No weepy moments.

“You'll be okay up here?” he said.

“I'll be at Beech Creek most of the time.” She kept her tone light.

She couldn't say so, but she was glad to be leaving. The Meadows was too small, Julie and Rick Garsh too ubiquitous.

“I'll have a little something for you once Rick's check clears,” he said. “For all the hours you put in. To add to the kitty.”

A flare of anger: that he would give her money to send her on her way.

“If you can't get hold of me here, call me at Beech Creek,” she said. “I plan to work double time.”

*   *   *

In bed that last night, Quinn held her too tightly. He wanted to stare into her eyes, he was too squirmy and abrupt in his movements.

“These were the best months of my life, since I was a boy,” he said.

“Me too.” She wasn't certain yet that this was true—she'd have to think about it—but why not say so now and make their last hours together sweet? Best months, second- or third-best months: she hadn't allowed herself such formulations.

She had been calming and kind to him for so long. Now, impatience jolted through her. What more could be said? They'd reached their agreed-upon limit. She put her back to him, feigned sleep. At some far remove, her distant chorus sang.

This was the end, but not quite the very end—they had to meet in a few weeks so he could give her the “little something”—so she was not sad yet.

*   *   *

Friday morning, she followed him down the mountain in her Saab. She had a luncheon and a dinner banquet. Her plaid suitcase slid back and forth in the trunk on the curves.

The trailer looked ridiculous. Quinn had hitched it to his truck without clearing the accumulated snow off its roof. Five or six feet had compacted there, forming a concise history of snowfalls, glacial blue at the bottom, with compressed and stratified layers. The overall shape was a blunted trapezoid, like a scudding cloud or an enormous white pompadour. Quinn was charmed by its comical look. Evan, he said, would get a big kick out of it.

Eleven or twelve miles down the road, Quinn steered into a tight inside curve, and Cress watched as the trailer-with-snowpack leaned to the right, and then leaned some more. As the truck began pulling out of the curve—to the left—the top-heavy trailer continued its rightward trajectory. In languid slow motion, twisting at the hitch, the trailer leaned farther and farther to the right, finally landing softly on its side in a turnout, where a spring flowed from a small pipe into a culvert. The truck dragged the trailer a few more feet and stopped.

Cress pulled over and met Quinn beside the trailer's exposed chassis and white aluminum belly, so wrongly revealed. The top wheel still spun. Quinn's hands rested on his hips.

“Hey!” Cress elbowed his elbow. “That's good money! Lying right there on the ground.”

He touched her waist.

Two cars stopped. Men got out and closely examined the twisted hitch. A boxy green Forest Service vehicle drove up. The driver used a walkie-talkie to call for a tow truck. Quinn had to wait. Cress didn't want to be late, so she left him by the toppled trailer in a cluster of onlookers and went to work.

 

PART II

THE FOOTHILLS

 

Sixteen

Donna gave Cress a tiny bedroom off the dark, narrow front hall, between Norma, the established roommate, and a storage room. Cress's room was also half-relegated to storage; she could walk only partway around the bed before musical instruments in their cases, black speakers, and hatboxes blocked her way. Donna was an accumulator, a prodigious one. While Cress went to college and grad school, Donna had married, amassed the stuff of several households, then divorced with full custody of the goods.

Donna had cleared nine inches of clothes rod in the closet for Cress, enough for her work uniforms. The closet floor was a foot-deep jumble of shoes. Cress would have to live out of her plaid suitcase, and the only place for that was at the far foot of her bed. To draw the thin white curtain, Cress had to walk across the mattress and reach.

But this was only a way station; she'd live here for ten weeks at most—and better here than driving daily down and up the coiled road. Better here, with roommates, than alone in the Meadows in noxious proximity to Julie Garsh.

That first morning, she found coffee made in the kitchen and joined Donna at the picnic table under a white-trunked sycamore swelling at its nubs. Up and down the riverbank, backyard lawns and shade trees formed a lush green park. A black phoebe flew past, a long dirty string in her beak.

Here by the river, in her ruffled nightgown and slept-in braids, Donna looked romantic and slightly mad, Ophelian. “I didn't hear you come in last night. Sleep okay?”

“The Brotherhood of Masons partied hardy and late.” Cress stretched, yawning. She wore only a light sweater over her T-shirt. “There's so much more oxygen down here,” she said.

The Hapsaw, all forks united, gushed beyond Donna's back gate; flecks of foam from its eddies rode the air like tiny clouds. Donna said, “So. How'd you leave it with Quinn?”

“He's home,” Cress said.

“That's it? Went back to the wife?”

“He didn't go
back
,” Cress said. “He never left her.”

“At least he didn't get your hopes up.” Donna tucked her knees up under her gown. “I read that adultery's always about the primary couple, anyway. The third person's just a catalyst to shake things up.”

Cress tried not to feel insulted, but who wants to be
just a catalyst
? “It wasn't like that with us,” she said. “No shake-up.”

“Good,” said Donna. “Because even when men do leave their wives, they tend to bypass the mistress and move on to someone new, like 90 percent of the time. The mistress is the bus out of town, not the destination.”

Cress didn't like being called a bus, either, or, particularly, a mistress. “That can't be right!” she said. “People are always leaving marriages for other people!” Her parents' close friends the Greens, had famously both ditched spouses to marry each other. “Look at Rick Garsh—he left his wife for Julie and they're still together. For what that's worth.”

“I'm just saying what I read.” Donna examined the tip of one braid. “Which was that adultery might even save more marriages than it destroys. Not that it saved mine. But with my husband, it wasn't one case of adultery—more like two or three hundred.”

Cress pried a splinter off the table and used the sharp end to clean under her thumbnail. “I can see how, if people get their needs met discreetly, it can preserve the status quo at home.”

Donna laughed her throaty laugh. “More like, when the truth comes out and everything blows sky high, the couple can finally get honest with each other—and rebuild their marriage from the ground up!”

Cress squashed an ant with the splinter. “Well. Nothing's blowing sky high with Quinn.”

“Everything blew to pieces with Joe and me, but he never did get honest. You could hold a gun to his head and he couldn't tell the truth. That's 'cause he had no idea what the truth was!” Donna flung the braid over her shoulder. “At least you got out in one piece. Hey—want to walk into town for a doughnut?”

*   *   *

Roommates. Cress hadn't had them since sophomore year. Mostly, she tried to keep out of everyone's way, staying in her room until Donna and Norma left for work in the morning and using the common living area only when she had the house to herself. They shared a tiny pink bathroom. Bundling her hair into a ponytail before the mirror, Cress's elbow knocked Colgate, contact lens kits, and earrings off cluttered shelves into the sink.