Perfume River (6 page)

He picks up the phone and dials his mother’s cell.

“Thank God,” she says. “Where were you?”

“How is he?”

“Not good, honey. Not good. The doctor is very concerned.”

“We’ll talk when I get there,” Robert says. “You’re at Archbold?”

His mother does not reply. Then her beat of silence turns into a choked-back “Yes” and she begins to cry.

“It’s all right, Mom. He’s a tough guy. I’ll be there.”

“Hurry,” she says.

And Robert does. He pours his coffee into a thermos and dresses and writes a note to Darla. He tapes it to the front door:
My father has broken his hip. I’m in Thomasville. Don’t worry. Work well.

He turns onto Apalachee Parkway.

His mind roils with anticipated scenes at the hospital and he cuts each one off, tries to think of things he can manage. Like whether and how to make the connection, in his paper, between John Kenneth Turner’s partisanship in the Mexican civil war and factions of the Vietnam antiwar movement siding with the North and lionizing Ho Chi Minh. Easy things like that. Things not having to do with family.

In this struggle of mind, Robert seeks distraction, so he turns his eyes to the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church, which he is approaching. Here he routinely finds ironic amusement on a marquee that presumably intends to persuade the fallen to enter therein and learn the absolute truths of the universe, but doing so with messages that veer in tone between fortune cookies and one-liners from a born-again Milton Berle. But this morning his eyes slide past the new message to a Leon County EMS ambulance parked in front of the church, and then to a pair of white-coated men lifting a dark-clothed blur of a third man from a wheelchair into the back of the vehicle, and then past them to a fourth man, tall and nattily topcoated and standing stiffly upright, watching nearby and seeming, given the context, to be the pastor himself, the benighted editor in chief of that marquee.

And the church has passed and Robert thinks of his father, how he would share his son’s amused disdain for the man in the topcoat, how his disdain, unamused, extended as well to Mama’s priests. Robert wondered if that would be so even now, as his father finds himself on the cusp of some absolute truth of the universe, a truth you could learn for certain only by dying.

In a room over a clothing and leather goods shop on Baldwin Street in Toronto, Canada, Robert’s brother Jimmy is waking. He lies on his side, at the edge of his bed. The panes of the window before him are groved in fern frost. He owns the building, has owned it for thirty years. The shop is his. These winters are his, finally, more or less. The room is cold but he’s been sleeping with the covers sloughed down to his chest.

He pulls them up now to cover his arms, his mind filling: windowpanes overgrown with ice; an upstairs room in a two-story brick row house; he and Linda clinging close in a sleeping bag on a futon, the ice lit by the streetlight on McCaul. This was their first winter in Canada, spent only a few blocks from where he now lies thinking. The house was rented by an earlier wave of American resisters and deserters and the women who fled with them. They’d turned it into a commune and a crash pad for other exiles newly arrived. He and Linda had crashed there the previous summer but were permanent by that winter night, the night they celebrated the occasion of their
meeting, eighteen months earlier. They had done so with a sweet lovemaking—slow and quiet, as there were two other couples asleep in this room—and with a trembling from the cold that never quite stopped, even after they’d spent themselves and lay clinging.

Jimmy blinks at the daylight brightness of this ice before him now.

He closes his eyes.

He thinks:
That was the closest we have ever been. In that moment.

This is perhaps true.

His mind declines to fill with details of subsequent events, from only a few weeks later: Linda’s hand on the commune founder’s arm, sounds behind a closed door, the smell of him on her skin. Nor with the subsequent principled conversation he and Linda calmly had, after a few hours of shouting, about the liberated soul, male and female, alike and equal, about a new age and a new culture and the freedom of love. Which was like their principled conversation in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, about war. And like their principled decision, as his student deferment expired the following spring, for them to begin anew together in this place. This cold place.

All of that so long ago.

They’ve stuck to their principles.

He is weary now. In the legs, in the hips, in the groin, in the chest. In the eyes.

He opens his eyes once more to the ice on the window.

And he sees only the floaters. The lifelong accumulation of all the little crap between him and the world. Sometimes he can see through them as if they aren’t there. Sometimes they are all he can see.

He is glad he will be with Linda tomorrow in their home on Twelve Mile Bay. Next month they will have been married twenty-four years, at last for more than the number of years they were together unwed.

He hunches his shoulders and draws the covers closer.

He owns the building but the room is cold.

He’ll have Heather call someone to look at the furnace. And he sees her now, sees not floaters, not ice, not the scenes of principled compromise between him and his wife, but sees Heather sitting before the iMac in the back room downstairs, just yesterday morning. He stepped into the doorway from the front of the shop and she realized he was there and he could see a little smile come to her face. A smile because he was there, because it was him. And she did not care if he could see. She smiled to her own purpose, her own intentions, her own unvoiced willingness, before she let him know she knew he was there.

Then she touched command-S and swiveled in her chair, and her skin was as white as a new snowdrift, though the smile she gave him directly was meltingly warm, and her usually heavy-lidded dark eyes widened with the smile. She was somewhere in her thirties, a single mother of an early-teenage girl, but his head filled with the talk of Heather Blake: how she thought it was very cool, very very cool he’d been a hippie;
how her benighted parents had despised the hippies but she longed for that life, because as free as things seemed to be in her generation—and God help us how free it was for teenagers today—it was free only in blow jobs and loose talk; how the spirit wasn’t free, how it took an old spirit to be free, a mature spirit, like his. All of which talk had accreted over the couple of months she’d worked for him. Never a pointed discussion. But bit by bit. Yesterday morning, confronting Heather’s smile and the history of this talk, he sagged heavily against the doorjamb. But he simply asked,
How’s the website going?
She laughed. As if she read his mind. As if she were saying, How silly you are. But she said,
It’ll be back up within the hour.

Jimmy is still lying on his side, facing the window.

The principles they spoke of, he and Linda, their freedom to love, those were never undone. Not even on their wedding day. Not overtly.

And the marriage has lasted. Canada has lasted.

He is keenly aware of two things now. The stalks and leaflets of the fern blades on the window seem hoary but alive, even though they are an illusion, merely a cold replica of a living thing. And the bed. He is aware of the bed.

He eases from his side onto his back.

He turns his head.

The bed is empty.

Not that she is gone, Heather Blake. She has never been here.

He lifted himself from the doorjamb yesterday morning and stood straight and thanked her for her Internet expertise,
and he turned away from that little cocking of the head she gave, as if she’d expected him to say something else. Lately she always seemed to be waiting for him to say something else. But he turned and went about his business.

Through the years he has acted three times on the principle of personal freedom that he and Linda agreed upon. Briefly acted. The incidents were discreet but never intentionally hidden; they simply were never spoken of. That deceptionless silence also was decided between them. There’d been no need to say anything; their daily lives, each with several separate friendships and separate responsibilities in their business, especially during the two decades on Twelve Mile, made that easy. The commune founder seemed to have been a brief thing for her. Jimmy is not sure if or how often she has exercised her privilege, since.

But why exactly is his own bed empty now?

He does not quite regret it. If he has regrets, he could still act. But he does briefly wonder why.

The answer, he senses, lies in the image of the fern frost lingering deep in his chest like a nascent cough. Long ago he and Linda left their parents’ religion—left all religion—behind. But for the past few years there have been things Jimmy’s been trying to work out in some other way. Most recently he has been telling this to himself, which, indeed, he does again now: It
is only science of the past hundred and fifty years that has shaken our belief in our consciousness surviving death. But elemental science gives us examples that confirm the ancient and abiding paradigm. The caterpillar
,
for instance, does not even have the sensory mechanism to perceive the butterfly it will become; but it will be transformed nevertheless
.

He is sixty-eight.

He coughs, drily, from the chill he carries inside him.

Surely the pale nakedness of Heather Blake would be a more certain hedge against death.

And yet it isn’t, somehow. The young feel they are immortal.
Must
they, to care so much about fucking?

He is to have lunch with his leather tanner today. But Jimmy wants simply to drive the three hours home. The lunch is mostly a social meeting. Maybe he can pull the meeting forward to a morning coffee.

And he does.

So shortly after one o’clock he turns off the Trans-Canada Highway onto Twelve Mile Bay Road. For nearly a week there has been no snow and the road is clear, the drifts and plow-spew mounded up on both sides of the narrow pavement, tunneling him home. After seven miles he takes the fork onto Harrison Trail along the north side of the bay, and six miles farther he turns off Harrison toward the water and into his ten acres, thick with snow-swathed white pines.

He emerges from the tree line, and off to the right is the south-facing, two-story, board-and-batten, Italianate house he and Linda restored from a century’s worth of battering by Lake Huron winters. The place is a homely architectural idea, especially in its simplified farm version, a box with a low-pitched hip roof and a runt of a front porch. A Birkenstock
of a house. But perhaps even because of that, it has always felt right to them, and they’ve made it their own.

He took their Volvo to Toronto and he parks in their adjacent garage. Linda’s Forester is gone. He hoped to catch her at the house before going out to the barn. He didn’t even have a thought of what they might do. Just sit together for a while. Talk about small things.

He walks the hundred yards west along their asphalt connecting drive to the leatherworks, their converted and expanded three-bay English barn where they still make their own highend handbags and purses, satchels and briefcases, portfolios and backpacks, sketchbooks and journals and Apple appurtenances. The car, the two SUVs, and the pickup of the four women who work for him are aligned before the barn. There are no marked spaces on the asphalt skirt but most days the order of the vehicles is the same, the spacing even. His Gang of Four is meticulous in everything.

As he approaches, the low roiling of his mind subsides. There should be laptop satchels and messenger bags ready for edge finishing. When the pieces are intended for shelf stock it’s understood Jimmy will always do the finishing himself. As he’s become successful and volume has increased, he’s let all the other work go to his gang. But this near-last thing, this labor-intensive thing, subtle to the eye but a hallmark of a quality bag, this he has kept for himself on as many of the bags as possible: the application of his special formula of beeswax and paraffin wax and edge paint layered and heated and sanded half a dozen times and sometimes more, sealing the leather tight from rain
and snow and the moisture-laden air itself. He has occasionally wondered, but never tried to calculate, the number of hours of his life that he’s been sealed inside the doing of this thing. Jimmy’s Zen, the women of the leatherworks call it.

He steps through the middle bay door.

As soon as it’s shut behind him, before he deals with people, he pauses and takes in the smell of the new leather, thick in the air from a recent shipment of top-grain sides. The leather that he buys, from the man he saw this morning, is special: trench-cured, packed tight in rock salt and buried in the earth for three months; and bark-tanned, bathed with oak and hemlock. Gamey still, this smell, fatty, faintly briny, but with an undercurrent of a smell like hazelnut. He closes his eyes to concentrate on that deep-current scent, a promise of the settled, sweet-fumy leather smell to come, something his customers will want to put their faces against, to breathe in.

He opens his eyes.

In this central barn space, the women, knowing his ritual, are looking up from their stations, waiting for him. Two of them have been cutting pattern pieces, skiving edges—the skiving the only thing done by machine on the best of their bags—and the always laser-focused Mackenzie twins have been hand-stitching.

“Good afternoon, Gang of Four,” he says.

“Good afternoon, Jimmy,” they say in unison.

All but Mavis immediately return to work.

She leaves her patterns, steps around the table, and approaches him.

She has worked for him for a dozen years, living alone for ten of them, during which decade she was a divorcée from a man and lean of build, but two years ago she married a woman and she filled out with happy fat, which she has since been pleased to keep. In those ten previous years she would not have been the one to rise to greet him, but she is the one before him now and smiling.