The Banks of Certain Rivers (12 page)

“Here,” I say, getting up to take two of the bottles from
her.

“God, I wish she could be like that all the time,” Lauren
says with a sigh. “Poor thing.” She holds the last bottle
out and as I take it she leans forward and kisses me, fully and with
no intention of pulling away. I bend my knees just enough to put the
wine on the ground and rise back up to slip my right hand around her
back. My left hand slides down Lauren’s hip, over her jeans,
between her legs and up, and as I start to press against her she lets
out a breathy laugh and bites my chin.

“You can’t you can’t
you can’t
,”
she says. “We have to get over there. I don’t have a
change of clothes. Neil, we have to. You’re going to make me a
mess.”

“We could go inside and take off your clothes,” I murmur
into her hair. “Mine could come off too. The problem would be
solved.”

“We cannot.” Lauren places her hands against my chest
like she’s going to shove me away, but she stops and wraps her
arms around me. “Later. Kris and Alan are waiting.”

“This is some unexpected restraint,” I say, kneeling down
to put the third bottle in with the others. “Seeing how you’ve
been lately. But fine, fine.” I let out an exaggerated sigh.
“It’s fine, I guess. I’ll just save myself up.”

“You save yourself up, pal,” she says, and she gives my
rear end a smack as I pick up the canvas bag and start away. We set
off down my drive, and the moonlight shines in our faces. There’s
a path along the road to Alan’s house, worn smooth by feet and
bicycle tires, and I let Lauren go ahead of me when we come to it.

Some lights are still on in Carol’s house as we cross her broad
front yard. I put timers in there a year ago to create the illusion
of activity; it makes Carol feel better if we make it appear that
she’s getting around easily in her home.

“You really didn’t say anything to her about us having
dinner?” I ask, and Lauren swings her head.

“Why would I even bring it up?”

“I don’t know, you spend a lot of time over there with
her.”

“So do you. Maybe
you
let it slip?”

“Yeah, right.” I maneuver the shopping bag’s straps
up to my shoulder, and the bottles clank together inside.

“Yeah, right. Neil, I
know
, okay? I get it. I’m
not going to let anything slip. No one’s going to know anything
until you’re ready. I’m fine with it.”

“I don’t get how you can be, sometimes.”

“You know why. I tell you enough. You just never want to tell
me back, though. You don’t like to say it.”

“That’s not true. I do say it.”

Lauren laughs. “Okay, say it right now, then.”

“You’re putting me on the spot. It wouldn’t be
meaningful.”

“Just say it. You don’t even need to mean it.”

“I do mean it, though.”

“Mean what?”

“You’re trying to trick me.”

“If you mean it, if you feel it, saying it shouldn’t be
such a big deal. But I’m not going to force you or anything.
Just remember to tell me once in a while. I like to hear it. And not
just when we’re messing around.”

I think about this; is that really the only time I tell her I love
her?

The thing is, I do love Lauren. Wildly, madly. I really do. It’s
hard to love things, though. It’s especially hard to admit it.
In my experience, the minute you admit that you really love
something? That’s just about the time it decides to go away.

After her brother’s car
accident, Lauren spent nearly a month in Pennsylvania. Before she
left, I told her to text me if she needed me to take care of anything
for her while she was gone. I didn’t really expect to hear from
her, thinking she’d be pretty busy back home, but hardly a week
passed before I got a message from her. I’d been expecting her
to ask me to water her plants or something, but instead that first
message said:

God, I forgot how much I hate this place
.

The rest of her messages were similar in tone. There’s a strip
mall at every intersection, she’d write. There’s an
Applebees in every mall. I miss Port Manitou. I want to come home.
I’d type a message back asking what I could do, asking how her
brother was doing, and she’d simply write back: no, nothing,
all set, he’s doing fine.

I want to come home.

Three days before she did come home, she called me to let me know
when her flight would be arriving. Could I pick her up? Would I, she
asked, if it wasn’t too much of a bother? Of course I would.

“Dinner probably won’t work that night,” she added.
“I’ll be too tired.” She laughed. “You didn’t
really think I forgot about it, did you?”

After she’d been back a couple days, we made our plans.
Conveniently, Christopher would be spending the night at a friend’s
house, and Lauren suggested we go to a restaurant she loved in
Traverse City. I didn’t know if she really wanted to go all the
way out there because she liked the place so much, or if somehow she
sensed how concerned I was over the possibility of the two of us
being seen together in Port Manitou. Not that I was worried about it
for my sake; I just wasn’t sure how Christopher might take it.

We had a good time on our date. What surprised me the most was what
an effortlessly good time it was, especially on the twenty-minute
drive there; I picked her up and there were no forced moments or
awkward silences. She caught me up on her brother’s condition,
told me anecdotes both funny and aggravating over our meal about his
rehabilitation, her family, her hometown. When we made it back to her
place, we talked for nearly half an hour while my truck sat idling.

“You could just park and shut the car off, you know,” she
said. “We could keep talking inside, and you wouldn’t
waste fuel or irritate my neighbors.”

“I didn’t want to be presumptuous,” I said.

“Oh, look at you. A gentleman!” She pointed at the keys.
“Just shut off the engine.”

“But also….”

“But also what?”

“But also I want there to be a second time,” I said.
“After this time.” I had to laugh at myself. “Look,
I’m sorry.” I shook my head. “It’s been a
while since I’ve done anything like this.”

She peered out over the hood, into the condo lot, and smiled. “Park
over there,” she said, pointing. “Then let’s go
upstairs and talk.”

There was a second time. A second, and a third.

And as the weeks went on, there were more times after that.

The faint buzz of
a
jazz saxophone—one of Alan’s Coltrane albums on vinyl,
I’m betting—rolls out through the screen door of Alan and
Kristin’s house as we come up through their front yard. I hear
Kristin say, “They’re here!” from inside and she
meets us at the door. She’s a tiny woman, barely five feet
tall, and she looks young despite being almost fifty with defiantly
white hair.

“I think it’s safe,” she says,
sotto voce
,
making a show like she’s looking for spies out in the darkness
before she ushers us in. “No one followed you over, did they?”

“Didn’t hear anyone,” Lauren says, smiling at the
ribbing I’m getting.

I give Kristin a squeeze and a kiss on the cheek. “You can both
stop it now. Really.”

“I’m teasing. Your lip doesn’t look bad at all. And
here Alan had me thinking you were going to look like a monster.”

“Neil, come here!” Alan calls from deep in the house. I
head back to his study, and find my friend seated before three
enormous flat screen monitors—two more than the last time I was
in here—across his desk. The walls of the room are lined with
books, mostly aviation books, along with pictures and mementos from
his time as a pilot.

“Check this out,” he says, angling the center monitor
toward me. “Watch this guy.” He starts an online video of
a jumbo jet approaching a runway at an impossible angle,
straightening out at the last possible second to make the landing.
“YouTube,” he says, shaking his head as he shoves the
monitor back into place. “Who came up with this thing? I could
watch those crosswind landings all day. Sometimes I do.”

On the desk next to the keyboard is something like a steering wheel
that Chris might have for his video game console down in our
basement.

“What is this?” I ask, picking it up. It’s
surprisingly heavy.

“Ah ha, it’s a control yoke for the new flight
simulator.” Alan points under the desk. “We have rudder
pedals too. The realism in this software is amazing. Especially with
the extra monitors, it’s like a panoramic view. Want to see me
fly it?”

“Not particularly.”

“Come over sometime and try it. It’ll make your palms
sweat. I need to stay current. Keep up on my instrument approaches.”
Alan pauses for a moment, looking at the setup. “I need to be
ready for….” He stops himself again. “You know.”

“Yeah,” I say. Alan shuts down the system, and I follow
him out of the study. There’s a picture of him hanging just
inside the door to the hallway; he’s standing in a jetway in
his pilot’s uniform: hat, epaulets, a pair of silver wings
pinned to his chest. He’s relaxed in the photo, a wry
half-smile on his face, a briefcase down by his feet. I see Alan
glance at the picture as we pass it, and I feel bad for him.

Kris and Lauren are chatting on the living room couch when we come
out, leaning close and laughing. Kristin nods and raises her eyebrows
when she sees us.

“Did he show you his new video game?” she asks me.

“It is
not
a video game,” Alan says. “You
talk like it’s a child’s toy. That software is a highly
sophisticated training aide. Used by professionals. Like myself.”
He grabs me by the elbow and pulls me to the kitchen. “Come on.
There’s work to be done. Ingredients to be prepped. And wine to
be drunk.”

“Now you’re talking,” I say.

“And after the meal is consumed and the wine is drunk, I have
something else for us in the form of a bottle of ouzo sent by Nicole.
A nod to your heritage.”

Nicole—the older of Alan and Kristin’s two daughters now
both away at college—is now somewhere in Europe for a junior
semester abroad.

“You forget this heritage is in name only,” I say.

“I forget nothing. We’ll drink to your adopted heritage.
We’ll honor your name.” Alan presses an onion into my
hand and points to a cutting board with a chef’s knife on it.
“Chop. Coarse chop is fine.”

In his spare time—and he does have a lot of spare time now,
Mega-Putt construction notwithstanding—Alan also keeps an
incredible garden, the abundance of which often spills into my home
and Christopher’s cooking experiments. Peppers, beans, corn,
squash. Varieties of melons and heirloom tomatoes. And onions, like
the massive one I’m cutting up right now.

“So things are good?” Alan asks as I chop and begin to
squint and cry from the onion. “With Lauren?”

“Just as good as they were this morning,” I say, wiping
my eyes with the backs of my wrists.

“You still want me to drop it, I can see.” He places a
bowl of gigantic homegrown tomatoes next to me. “Break these
down when you’re done with that onion. Coarse chop as well.
Look at you crying. I should have given you the onion last. Didn’t
your famous chef brother ever teach you the right way to use a knife?
I won’t be held accountable if you lose a finger in here. By
the way, Leland slowed down to check out Mega-Putt today. I watched
him from up here.”

“Just tell me what I need to cut,” I say.

With Alan directing, the two of us work our way through a pile of
ingredients (along with a pretty nice bottle of cabernet) to make a
cioppino. Renaissance guy that he is, Alan has baked loaves of bread
too, and we slice them up and brush them with olive oil before
toasting them under the broiler. The women have put a pretty big dent
into a bottle of wine themselves, and when the four of us come
together to sit at our meal the room is filled with jovial talk and
laughter. It washes over me, the wine and the food, and especially
the company, and as I laugh with my friends and hold Lauren’s
hand under the table next to me I am filled with a sublime joy.

Kristin gets up at some point to check a cobbler she’s put in
the oven, and I lean over and kiss Lauren’s cheek. Alan gives
me a look: a little knowing smile, a raised eyebrow. Telepathically,
through the alcohol and the camaraderie, I know he’s telling
me:

You could be like this all the time if you wanted, Neil.

Now Kristin’s back with oven mitts and dessert, she orders Alan
to grab ice cream and some bowls. He comes back with a bottle of wine
instead, one of their own.

“Have we gone through those other three bottles already?”
Lauren asks.

“Just be glad he didn’t bring out that grappa,”
Kristin says.

“Ouzo,” Alan corrects her.

“Ouzo, whatever. We’ll regret it in the morning, whatever
it is.”

Later, after more laughter
and ouzo and Alan’s repeated refusals to give us a tour of
Mega-Putt, Lauren and I start back home, taking the long route back
through the orchard. The moon is high now, casting sharp shadows and
lighting our way, and with the anise-flavored spirits thick in my
veins I’m holding Lauren’s hand and taking care with
every step. She still needs to drive home, so she paced herself after
that first bottle of wine, wisely skipping Alan’s multiple
toasts to my adopted ancestry.

“I love you, Neil,” she says, giving my hand a squeeze as
I hold a branch out of our way. “I really do. You make me so
happy.”

I take a breath to answer, and she stops me.

“I wasn’t just saying it so you’d say it back,
either.”

“Why do you think I was going to say it back?” I say, and
I hope there’s enough moonlight for her to see how I’m
grinning. “You’re assuming I was going to say it.”
I hope she can hear the wink in my voice. I’m floating on the
fine evening, and I want her to know it.