Stay (18 page)

Tammy was dressed and on what looked like her third cup of coffee by the time I got back. The bright interior of the trailer seemed garish after the cold clarity of the woods. “I was trying not to get worried,” she said.

“I woke up this morning and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen or heard a groundhog in days, that they’ve begun to hibernate, and I went out into the woods and saw the first gouged tree of the season—from deer, rubbing the velvet off their new antlers—and I realized it’s November.”

“Okay. Let’s pretend I don’t understand what you’re talking about and need a few hints.”

“Today is the second of November. My birthday.”

“Your birth—”

“And I was thinking, there are a few things we need, and I should return that Neon.”

“Wait. Back up. How old are you?”

“Thirty-two. And you were saying only yesterday that your hair needs cutting. We could go into Asheville. Maybe have something to eat, something to drink.”

She blinked. Maybe it was her first cup of coffee after all. Then she smiled. “When do you want to leave, birthday girl?”

We dropped the Neon off first, then I drove the truck to the salon, where there were already two people waiting; I stayed long enough to say hello to Dree and tell Tammy that if I wasn’t back by the time she was done I’d meet her in the café next door.

On Church Street, I hesitated, engine running, outside the Asheville Savings Bank, while I thought, I can’t, I’m not ready, but had no idea what I meant. Eventually I parked.

The manager’s office, white shelves holding books and plants surrounding her door, light wood desk, medium window, was as relaxed as she was. At my suggestion, she called Lawrence, my banker in Atlanta, and decided as a result that she would be very happy to attend to my every need as far as local business dealings were concerned. She came round to my side of the desk, shook hands, and prepared to escort me back into the public space and the care of a trusted teller.

By the door, I noticed the bonsai tree. A perfect oak, ancient and stately, and only six inches high.

“Eighty years old,” she said. “It was an anniversary present from my husband. Beautiful, isn’t it? It came with a book—”

When I had tried to talk to her about setting up a Swiss account, my mouth had dried up, and I imagined a nine-year-old in a foreign country, with no love, no one to rely on. I don’t care, I told myself, I’ve never even met her—and what use would I be to her in jail? But I still hadn’t opened my mouth.

“—torture it: prune the roots, clip out new limb growth, and wire the branches to achieve the desired shape. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just let it grow.”

The manager shook herself from contemplation of the tree and asked if, apart from facilitating an immediate account, there was anything else she could do to help.

She gave me directions to Architectural Glass, two different hardware stores, and a place called Bathed in Light.

Bathed in Light had exactly what I needed. I arranged to go back later that afternoon to pick up the bathtub, sinks, and other fixtures I had picked out. Thoughts of Karp and fingerprints got muddled up with stainless steel faucets and brass-accented showerheads.

Architectural Glass was harder to find and there was nowhere nearby to park—unusual in Asheville. The woman who tried to answer my questions was one of those transplants from the Northeast who believe they are far, far better than anyone who has ever lived in any of the southern states. She smiled patronizingly while I explained what I wanted, then explained to me why that wouldn’t be possible. I asked to see the manager. She told me she hardly thought that would be necessary. I told her she was right, she hardly thought, which was why I wanted to see the manager. Now. It turned out I couldn’t have the glass until the day after tomorrow.

By the time I got back in the truck, I’d been gone from Dree’s for two and a half hours. The hardware store and Radio Shack would have to wait. I parked outside the café and went in.

No Tammy.

“Aud!” she said from Dree’s station as I pushed open the door of the salon, “we were just wondering where you’d got to! Sorry it’s taking so long but Dree had three people in front of me.“ She pointed at three bags lined up in the waiting area. ”I even had time to do some shopping.“ But then she turned around to the mirror again and she and Dree went back to talking a mile a minute about Dree’s mother, who according to Dree seemed to be getting weird in her old age, I mean like
different
, and Tammy totally agreed: that seemed to happen to moms at a certain age, they forgot they were
old
. It amazed me how people could bring out different facets of each other’s personalities It looked as though they would be a while.

“I’ll be next door, in the café if—”

“Oh, I’ll be through in just a minute,” Dree sang. “Why don’t you wait?”

So I sighed and stayed and watched as the damp tangle around Tammy’s ears turned into beautifully shaped hair, and they talked about some upcoming party or other. Then they were both standing, swatting chunks of hair off the nylon robe, dusting at Tammy’s neck, admiring Dree’s handiwork in the mirror

“Tammy’s been telling me all about your cabin!” Dree said. “You didn’t tell me you were doing the work yourself.”

“No. It’s—”

“That’s thirty-five dollars,” she said to Tammy, then back at me, “Your cut’s holding up well, but don’t leave it more than another two weeks before you come in again.”

“All my cash is gone,” Tammy said. It had been my cash to start with. I handed over two twenties and two ones.

Dree put them in the till, then said, “Why don’t you come tonight, too? It’s your birthday after all, right?”

I stared at Tammy, but she didn’t even look apologetic. “Dree’s mother is having a party tonight. Dree wanted to know if I’d go with her.”

“Yeah,” Dree said, “everyone else will be fifty.”

You don't know us, I wanted to say, What would your mother think? But then I remembered her mother was an ex-hippie woman-on-the-land feminist who had named her daughter after some Hindu earth mother figure, and it seemed clear that Tammy really wanted to go, and it was one way to not think about the New York police gathering clues, or a nine-year-old girl lying in bed alone at night wondering why no one loved her.

“It’s just outside town,” Tammy said. “Closer to the cabin.”

“Come about seven,” Dree said.

“What should we bring?” I asked her.

“Something to drink?” She didn’t sound too sure.

“Perhaps if I knew what the party’s for…”

“Well, you know. To have fun?”

“It’s something they do every year,” Tammy said. “Dree’s mother and her old friends—about forty. Some bring guests, some don’t. They like meeting new people, right Dree?”

Dree looked amazed at Tammy’s summary, but I should have trusted Tammy to know everything she needed in order to bring, wear, and talk about the appropriate things.

“About seven then?” Tammy said to Dree. “And thanks for the cut.”

She didn’t thank me for paying for it, just picked up two of the bags and left the third for me to carry. It was the heavy one.

Tammy dropped the high school senior act as soon as we’d stowed the bags and entered the café. “What’s good here?”

“I have no idea.” But the chili and corn bread looked worth trying. Tammy decided on Caribbean quesadillas with avocado and pineapple.

I told her about the glass showroom, that we wouldn’t be able to fit the windows for at least two days, and then tried to describe the bathroom fixtures I’d chosen. I found I wasn’t very good at it. In the end, I got up and brought the catalogue from the truck.

“Very you,” she said as she looked over the simple, turn-of-the-nineteenth-century reproductions, the lever taps with white porcelain handles, the deep, claw-footed tub, the wide, white-enameled kitchen sink. “Modern faucets for the kitchen, though, right?”

I nodded. “You can take authenticity too far.”

We talked about bathrooms, how as a child she had longed for one like a pink palace, pink quartz floor, red gold taps with ruby inserts, pink fur rugs… “I’m not sure when the pink thing faded. A couple of years ago I wanted one of those industrial-looking places, you know: all steel and glass and straight lines. Black floor tiles, white porcelain.”

Like a hospital room.

“Now I’m thinking something warmer: terra-cotta tile, plants, big old tub.”

“Did you and Dornan…” I didn’t finish the question. I had no idea why I’d begun it.

“Talk about setting up house? No. He wanted to but he never brought it up. I’d have run a mile. Did you and Julia?”

“No. It…” I shook my head. “No. It seemed so obvious we’d spend the rest of our lives together that we didn’t even discuss it.”

“So, you would have got back from Norway and argued about bathroom furniture.”

I picked up the catalogue and traced the picture of the tub with my finger. “She might not have liked this.”

“Who would have won?” Tammy was smiling, and just for a moment my memories of Julia were happy ones—watching her face in the Oslo art gallery as she explained Norwegian neo-Romanticism; pulling her to me when I was in the tub; frying freshly caught fish—free of a hovering sense of doom, free of guilt, free of anything but happiness, and I was able to smile back.

“She would.”

“You want more coffee?”

I didn’t, there was still the hardware store and Radio Shack to visit and the fixtures to load, but the sense of lightness and gladness, of being able to remember Julia without guilt, persisted, on and off, all afternoon: the perfect birthday gift.

I took another sip of the Woodward Canyon Reserve chardonnay—Tammy's choice; mine was rioja—and its smoky oak flavor distracted me for a minute from what the man standing opposite me near the fireplace was saying. His name was Henry something or other, an old-fashioned name for a man wearing aggressively fashionable glasses, slits that didn’t seem big enough to see through.

“… those days, not like Adrian”—Dree’s mother—“and the rest of us. ”

“How long have you been here”

“Not as long as the women’s land collective. I came in ’79. We started with nothing, not even common sense.” He smiled as if to say, You know what it’s like to be young and foolish, and I realized that I had not thought about Karp or New York for at least an hour.

“So how do you know Adrian”

“Oh, I’ve known
of
her for about twenty years, but she and the others were rabid lesbian separatists until the mid-eighties.” He gave the woman sitting on the tapestried couch on the other side of the room an affectionate look. Adrian was in her mid-fifties; her hand rested on the thigh of a man who appeared to be ten years her junior, and the looks they exchanged were frankly sexual Now I understood Dree thinking her mother was getting, like, weird. “She’s changed a lot then?”

“We all have.”

There were about fifty people at the party, ranging in age from early sixties to early twenties, the older crowd’s children.

The atmosphere was one of village get-together— people who had known each other for decades, and been through economic, political, and emotional change. I tried to imagine them in tie-dye and beards, or working naked on the land, getting stoned and talking about the power of the patriarchal military-industrial complex, but all I could see were accountants and psychotherapists, the sons and daughters of middle America finally leading the kind of lives their parents would at least have understood, if not wholly approved. For that there would have to have been more wedding rings, more socks, and some meat among the Brie and smoked salmon and vegetable dip in the dining room.

I excused myself, and refilled my glass. Tammy stood to the right of Adrian’s couch, talking to a man and woman in their twenties who were hand in hand. The man’s blue eyes seemed vaguely familiar. I watched Tammy for a while; she wasn’t touching the man on the arm, or giving him extra big smiles, or arching her back so that her breasts pressed against her thin sweater, she wasn’t canting her hips and shoulders so that the woman was cut out of the conversation; she wasn’t just a couple of inches too close. I stepped forward and she saw me.

“Aud!” She opened the circle. “This is Shari, and Ken, Dree’s brother.” That explained the eyes. I swapped my wine to my left hand and we exchanged handshakes and pleased-to-meet-you’s. “Ken works for a construction company—”

“McCann, right?”

He smiled. “How did you know that?”

I pointed to my haircut. “Dree ”

He smiled some more, but I saw how his hand stiffened in Shari’s and thought he must get tired of Dree talking about him and his affairs to all and sundry.

“Like I was saying, Ken works for a construction company. I told him about the cabin and what kind of stove we were looking for, and he thinks he knows where we can find one. I told him we’d already tried that place on Merrimon.”

Since when had there been a
we
?

“Tammy tells us you want something you can cook with,” Shari said. She had long, honey-colored hair and beautifully shaped nails. “Maybe a wood-burning range is the way to go.”

“Just a plain stove,” I said. “Something along the lines of an old Intrepid, that’ll heat the cabin—”

“—and boil a pan of water if necessary.” Now Ken's smile was real. “We had one of those our first couple years up the mountain. That’s all we had. Wonderful thing. Dree was just starting to crawl. I was seven. It was my job, while Mom was in endless collective meetings, to make sure Dree didn't stick her hand on it. Those puppies get hot when they're going! Wonder what happened to it.” He literally shook himself, like a dog trying to get dry. “There are a couple places along Emma Road you might try. They supply me when I do independent contracting. Tell them I sent you and they might give you a discount.”

“I will. But I don’t know your last name.”

“Johnson.”

Son of John. “Bet Adrian didn’t like that.”

He grinned. “She changed our names to Moon for a while after she left Dad and dragged us up here, but never got around to making it legal, so at school Dree and I were always Johnson, and it just crept back. How about you? You sound British.”

“Norwegian. Aud Torvingen.”

Shari’s mother, it turned out, was originally from Denmark. Shari had visited Copenhagen for the first time last year. Wonderful city. Did I know it?