The Best American Short Stories 2014 (42 page)

The woman had been introduced to the man seven weeks earlier, at a dinner party at a mutual friend's home in the Berkeley Hills. The friend, closer to the man than to the woman, had said to the man, “You'll like Mariella. You'll like her face,” and to the woman, “Simon's an extraordinary person, but it may not be evident immediately. Give him time.”

The woman and the man had gone on several walks together already. But a hike of such ambition seemed, to the woman, something quite different.

She'd said, “Yes! I'd love that.”

 

It was late afternoon. They had been hiking for several hours and were now making their way single file down the mountain. The woman was descending first, then the man. The man, the more experienced hiker, wanted to watch over the woman, whom he didn't trust not to hurt herself. She'd surprised him by wearing lightweight running shoes on the trail and not, as he was wearing, hiking boots.

She hadn't thought to bring water, either. He carried a twenty-ounce plastic bottle of water for them both.

The man was a little annoyed by the woman. Yet he was drawn to her. He hoped to like her more than he did—he hoped to adore her. He had been very lonely for too long and had come to bitterly resent the solitude of his life.

It had been an unnaturally balmy day for late March. At midday, the temperature was perhaps sixty-eight degrees. But now, as the sun sank like a broken bloody egg, darkness and cold began to rise from the earth. The day before, the man had suggested to the woman that she bring a light canvas jacket in her backpack; he knew how quickly the mountain trail could turn cold in the late afternoon, but she had worn just a sweater, jeans, and a sun visor. (The woman's eyes were sensitive to sunlight, even with sunglasses. She hated how easily they watered, tears running down her cheeks like an admission of weakness.) And she'd confounded the man by not bringing a backpack at all, with the excuse that she hated feeling “burdened.” In the gathering chill, the woman was shivering.

The trail had looped upward through pine woods to a spectacular view at the peak, where the man had given the woman some water to drink. Though she said she wasn't thirsty, he insisted. There's a danger of dehydration when you've been exerting yourself, he said. He spoke sternly, as if he were a parent she could not reasonably oppose. He spoke with the confidence of one who is rarely challenged. At times, the woman quite liked his air of authority; other times, she resented it. The man seemed always to be regarding her with a bemused look, like a scientist confronted with a curious specimen. She didn't want to think—yet she thought, compulsively—that he was comparing her with other women he'd known, and finding her lacking.

Then the man took photographs with his new camera, while the woman gazed out at the view. Along the horizon was a rim of luminous blue—the Pacific Ocean, miles away. In the near distance were small lakes, streams. The hills were strangely sculpted, like those bald slopes in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton.

Absorbed in his photography, the man seemed to forget about the woman. How self-contained he could be, how maddening! The woman had never been so at repose in her
self
. For nearly an hour he lingered, taking photographs. During this time, other hikers came and went. The woman spoke briefly with these hikers, while the man appeared oblivious of them. It wasn't his habit, he'd told her, to strike up conversations with “random” people. “Why not?” she'd asked. And he'd said, with a look that suggested that her question was virtually incomprehensible, “Why not? Because I'll never see them again.”

With her provocative little laugh, the woman had said, “But that's the best reason for talking to strangers—you'll never see them again.”

At least the bearded young man with the English mastiff hadn't climbed to the top of Wildcat Peak, though other hikers with dogs had made their way there. A succession of dogs, in fact, of all sizes and breeds, fortunately most of them well behaved and disinclined to bark, several of them trailing their masters, older dogs, looking chastised, winded.

“Nice dog! What's his name?” the woman would ask. Or “What breed is he?”

She understood that the man had taken note of her fear of the mastiff at the start of the hike. How she'd tensed at the sight of the ugly wheezing beast. It had to be the largest dog she'd ever seen, as big as a St. Bernard but totally lacking that dog's benign shaggy aura. And so at the peak the woman made a point of engaging dog owners in conversations, in a bright, airy, friendly way. She even petted the gentler dogs.

As a child of nine or ten, she'd been attacked by a German shepherd. She'd done nothing to provoke the attack and could only remember screaming and trying to run as the dog barked furiously at her and snapped at her bare legs. Only the intervention of adults had saved her.

The woman hadn't told the man much about her past. Not yet. And possibly wouldn't. Her principle was
Never reveal your weakness
. Especially to strangers: this was essential. Technically, the woman and the man were “lovers,” but they were not yet intimate. You might say—the woman might have said—that they were still fundamentally strangers to each other.

They'd been together in the woman's house, upstairs in her bed, but they hadn't yet spent an entire night together. The man felt self-conscious in the woman's house, and the woman hadn't been able to fall asleep beside him; the physical fact of him was so distracting. Naked and horizontal, the man seemed much larger than he did clothed and vertical. He breathed loudly, wetly, through his open mouth, and though he woke affably when she nudged him, the woman hadn't wanted to keep waking him. In truth, the woman had never been very comfortable with a man at close quarters, unless she'd been drinking. But this man scarcely drank. And the woman no longer lost herself in drink; that life was behind her.

The woman liked to tell her friends that she wanted not
to get married
but to
be married
. She wanted a relationship that seemed mature, if not old and settled, from the start. Newness and rawness did not appeal to her.

“Excuse me? When do you think we might head back?” She spoke to the man hesitantly, not wanting to break his concentration. In their relationship, she had not yet displayed any impatience; she had not yet raised her voice.

At last the man put his camera, a heavy, complicated instrument, into his backpack, along with the water bottle, which contained just two or three inches of water now—“We might need this later.” His movements were measured and deliberate, as if he were alone, and the woman felt a sudden stab of dislike for him, anger that he could take such care with trivial matters and yet did not seem to love her.

There were no rest rooms on the damn trail, of course. These were serious hiking trails, for serious hikers. Longingly, the woman recalled the facilities at the trailhead. How long would it take to hike back down? An hour? Two? For male hikers, stopping to urinate in the woods was no great matter; for female hikers, an effort and an embarrassment. Not since she was a young girl, trapped on an endless, hateful hike in summer camp in the Adirondacks, had she been forced to relieve herself in the woods. The memory was hazy and blurred with shame, and humiliation at the very pettiness of her discomfort. If she'd told this story to the man, he would probably have laughed at her.

 

Driving to the park that day, the man and the woman had felt very happy together. It sometimes happened to them, unpredictably—a sudden flaring up of happiness, even joy, in each other's company. The man was unusually talkative. The woman laughed at his remarks, surprised that he could be so witty. She was touched that, a few days before, he'd visited the art gallery she ran, and purchased a small soapstone sculpture.

The woman slid over in the passenger's seat to sit closer to the man, as a young girl might do, impulsively. How natural this felt—a rehearsal of intimacy!

The car radio was playing a piano piece by the Czech composer Janáček, “In the Mists.” The woman recognized it after a few notes. She'd played the piano cycle as a girl. Her eyes filled with tears as she remembered. The man continued talking, as if he didn't hear the music. Avidly, the woman listened to the somber, distinctive notes in a minor—“misty”—key. She didn't register the man's words, but his voice was suffused with the melancholy beauty of the music, and she felt that she loved him or might love him.
He will be the one. It's time
.

The woman was forty-one years old. The man was several years older. He had been the director of a research laboratory in Berkeley for many years. His work was predominant in his life. He was idealistic, a zealot for science education and the preservation of the environment. He was famously generous to younger scientists, a legendary mentor to his graduate students and postdocs. He'd never married. He wasn't sure he'd ever been
in love
. Though he'd always wanted children, he had none. He was dissatisfied with his life outside the lab. He felt cheated and foolish, worried that others might pity him.

He'd been upset earlier that year, while visiting one of his protégés at the Salk Institute, whose wife was also a scientist and who had several children; the young family lived in a split-level cedar house on three acres of wooded land. In this household, the man had felt sharply the emptiness of his own existence, in an underfurnished rented house near the university, where he'd lived for more than twenty years. He'd ended the visit shaken. And not long afterward he'd met the woman at a dinner party.

The woman was also lonely and dissatisfied—but primarily with others, not with herself. She'd had several relationships with men since college, but she hadn't felt much for any of them. Some she had dated simultaneously. And yet she was deeply hurt if a man wasn't exclusively involved with her. Her father had left the family when she was a child and rarely visited. All her life she'd yearned for that absent man, even as she'd resented him. She'd hated her own vulnerability.

She was an attractive woman. Within her small circle of friends, she was popular, admired. She dressed stylishly. She was social. She'd invested wisely in her art gallery. Still, she was preoccupied with how she appeared in others' eyes. She could barely force herself to contemplate her own image in a mirror: her face, she thought, was too small, her chin too narrow, her eyes too large and deep-set. She hated the fact that she was petite. She'd have preferred to be five feet ten, to walk with a swagger, with sexual confidence. At five-three, it seemed she had no choice but to be the recipient, the receptacle, of a man's desire.

Sometimes, in the midst of buoyant social occasions, something inside the woman seemed to switch off. She could feel a deadness seeping into her, a chilly indifference. At the end of an evening, her women friends would hug her, or a friend's husband might slip his arm around her waist to kiss her, just a little too suggestively, and the coldness in her would respond,
I don't give a damn if I ever see any of you again
.

She laughed at herself. A hole in the heart.

Yet it happened, in the new man's company, that the woman felt a rare hopefulness. If she couldn't love the man, it might be enough for the man to love
her;
enough for them to have a child together, at least. (In the woman's weakest moments, she lamented the fact that she had no children, that she would soon be too old to have any. Yet children bored her, even her nieces and nephews, who she conceded were beautiful.)

What would the man have thought if he'd known about the woman's calculations? Or were these just harmless fantasies, unlikely to be realized?

 

Now, making her way down the trail, eager to be out of the park that had seemed so inviting hours ago, the woman felt disconsolate. The long wait at the peak had enervated her. The man's seeming indifference had enervated her. As the sun shifted in the sky, she felt strength leaking from her.

Brooding and silent, the man walked behind her, sometimes so close that he nearly trod on her heels. She wanted to turn and shout at him, “Don't do that! I'm going as fast as I can.”

So absorbed was the woman with the voice inside her head that she only half realized that she'd been hearing a familiar sound somewhere close by—a wet chuffing noise, a labored breathing. The trail continued to drop, turning back on itself; another, lower trail ran parallel to it now and would join it within a few yards, and on this trail two figures were hurrying, one of them, in the lead, a large beast running on all fours.

Appalled, the woman saw the enormous mastiff stop at the junction of the two trails, unavoidable. The dog's damp, shining eyes were fixed on her, sharply focused. With a kind of indignation quickly shifting to fury, it barked at the woman, straining at its leash as the bearded young man yelled at it to sit.

The woman knew better than to succumb to panic; certainly she knew better than to provoke the dog. But she couldn't help herself—she screamed and shrank away. It was the worst possible reaction to the dog, which, maddened by her terror, leapt at her, barking and growling, wrenching the leash out of its master's hands.

In an instant, the mastiff was on the woman, snarling and biting, nearly knocking her to the ground. Even in her horror, the woman was thinking, My face. I must protect my face.

Her companion quickly intervened, pushing himself between her and the dog, even as the dog, on its hind legs, continued to attack. Futilely, the dog's master shouted, “Rob-roy! Rob-
roy!
” The dog paid not the slightest attention.

The frantic struggle couldn't have lasted more than a minute or two. Fiercely, the man struck at the dog with his bare fists and kicked it. The young man yanked at the dog's collar, cursing. With great effort, he finally managed to pull the animal away from the man, who was bleeding badly now from lacerations on his hands and arms and face.