The Remedy for Love: A Novel (16 page)

Twenty-Seven

DANIELLE QUICKLY PUSHED
Jim’s letters into the FedEx envelope and tucked it under the bookshelf, hidden nook. They got into her cold bed, which smelled of old smoke and Ben-Gay. But that only made the new scent of her hair sweeter: Breck. They kissed lying face-to-face in the lamplight, a kiss borrowed unspoken from their future date, which might never happen, and so. And then another, and then what you could only call a soul kiss, a long, sweet, stirring communication. “Hold my ass,” she said into the midst of it.

“You said we’d just sleep.” The house muttered and groaned. Outside, the wind was roaring harder than ever, puffs of sweet cold air and pricks of moisture through the boards of the gable wall behind them. He kept his hand on her back, just loose.

“You lying there in your pants,” she said.

He said, “Is this really going to work?”

“It’s already working.”

In the loft, the wind could not be ignored, the thumps on the roof. How many hundreds of tons of snow pressed against the face of the building? They’d left clothes at the front window, boots, a Hannaford bag with the remains of their food, a roll of duct tape, the splitting maul. In a further emergency you’d smash the big window, dress fast, wrap up in the blankets, climb out and into the night, and hopefully not into the river. They listened a long time, their kiss having found its arc. How much more snow was coming down? After a long time, she turned away from him, pushed her butt into him. That was okay. It was all really going to be okay. He put his arm around her, held her breast. They’d invented a difference between sex and intimacy and it suited them both. Eric was glad he had his pants on, all philosophy regardless.

He put the lamp out, smell of kerosene after.

“Something I want to say,” Danielle murmured at length in the dark.

“Okay,” he said.

“Just. Okay. Just don’t fuck me in the night. I’ve got no protection. Okay? Though it’s not like I’ve been getting any monthlies. Too thin, way. But just don’t.”

He said, “Like I’d fuck anybody in the night.”

“I’m not anybody,” she said. “Remember?”

“Yes, yes you are.”

“Actually, I trust you,” she said, and pushed all the harder into him, both of them, he thought, full of the feeling that at any moment the cabin might collapse or slide off its piers.

Twenty-Eight

IN THE NIGHT
he woke to her crying—no subtle tears or hidden sorrow but deep, desperate sobs and gasps and moans into their slack pillow, into the back of his neck, into the deep darkness of the cabin—they’d both turned over in sleep. He reached behind and put a hand on her side and she pulled herself very close to him, cried into his shoulders clutching him and wetting him thoroughly with her tears before she subsided under his awkward gentle backward patting and turned away from him. She fell again to sleep.

Now he was the one awake, staring and mulling, a good honest talk with himself—he’d embarked on the care of a delicate psyche, gotten involved with a woman who, no matter what she said, was vulnerable. He’d taken advantage, or nearly. And if he did take advantage it would be something akin to getting tangled with a client. He’d come this far in blindness, because of wine, because he missed Alison, and not a little because Danielle was manipulating him, he suddenly thought: toxic, expert, needy, a pathological liar. Or because she was very appealing, and smarter, funnier, wiser, sexier, more careful—also older—than he’d been willing in his various layers of prejudice to understand. Or far from it: insane. Flowers from Jimmy. What a load of shit. Like the FTD man had walked down here! How had he managed to believe that? He wanted his phone. He hated his phone. He wanted to text Alison, unreasonably wanted to text her, composed a text in his mind, then another and another, just about the danger he was in. Or maybe it was that a gap was opening in his dependence on her. He thought of the things she’d said in their last conversation, already more than a month past, sentences that were warm enough but unmistakably valedictory in tone, her phone call, in fact, made just to cancel another dinner. No, Danielle, there hadn’t been any discussion of Senator Spruce Boughs or any other boyfriend or lover and Eric did not want to believe it of Alison. He was the one breaking their pact and breaking it with someone who’d wet the bed with tears and chopped her hair off with a fishing knife. But whom he’d only kissed, and that kiss in
fondness,
he told himself, mere fondness
.
Glad he had his pants on. He heard and saw several versions of Alison’s indictment in his head, offered his defense a dozen ways: text messages, e-mails, Facebook chats, on and on. He could see Alison’s golden face as it fell into rage: she was ugly when she was angry, all her flaws accentuated, and terrifying, too, worse than any judge he’d ever faced—adultery was serious. Her adultery, which somehow she always managed to bring back to him, convincing him that he’d opened a gap in her life almost purposefully through his passivity, and all she’d done was fill it. He could do it, he thought suddenly. He could quit her. She had left Eric, after all, and pretty emphatically—though she made it sound like his choice, made him believe it at times, or anyway he’d hear himself apologizing. Danielle’s heart thumped slowly at his back. The wind had died down. The cabin had ceased its complaining. Maybe the snow had stopped. He wondered if with your fingers you could feel a tattoo. He could hear the cookstove sucking air, that’s all, the fire quietly popping and sighing, very close to the end of their wood supply. His body was clean and felt perfectly delicious and pure. Hers, the same, and separately, no doubt about that, delicious and pure, with just the ribbon of lettering to call it all into question.

Next waking there was light, muted and blue and arctic. Danielle was on her back beside him dreaming—he lay there a while and watched her eyes moving under opaque lids, her lips half-forming mysterious words, her shoulders square as architecture, a deep pool at the nexus of her clavicles, her jaw line strong as his own, her chin a little square, her skin shining. He was hard as the old marble hitching post outside the courthouse. But only, Your Honor, because he had to urinate. He’d have more to do to extricate himself from this situation than chop his way out of a remote cabin and forge a half-mile-long path up a steep hill through record snowfall. Gingerly, he disentangled himself from the warm but mangy blankets and sleeping bags atop him, slipped out of the spavined old bed, stood there tumid in his pants in the very cold loft. He thought of the weather maps he’d seen as the monstrous trio of weather systems had approached from their three directions, and the somber but clearly thrilled weatherman who’d pointed out the unusual convergences of warm and cool air masses, enough of a distraction from sexual thoughts that after a while he could use the thunder mug, as his grandpa would have called it. He unzipped and peed carefully against the metal so as to make as little noise as possible. His shirt and socks and actually underpants were downstairs with the hammer. The big window over the river was still completely blocked with snow, thickly covered, though that was where the light was coming from, a kind of glowing oval in the middle of the expanse of glass, the whale sleeping. It might be dawn, it might be noon, no way of telling. He’d avoided a terrible mistake, and was yet in the midst of it. He’d saved a life, however. That should stay clear: Danielle would not have survived without help, and that had been his only mission. He was Jimmy Tremonton LaRoque’s ally, nothing worse than that.

“Okay,
mister,
” Danielle croaked. She’d been watching him. “Planning your escape?”

“Planning yours, too,” he said.

“No favors,” she said. She was older than he’d thought and crabby again: “I’m already gone. I’m already escaped. You do what you got to do and leave me out of it.”

“I have an idea,” he said. “My friend Patty Cardinal has a room she rents.”

“Fuck. No.”

“No, it’s nice. With its own entrance and stuff. Nice house, pretty nice. And she needs help with stuff. Like shoveling, that kind of thing. Her garden. I don’t know. She’d let you stay there free till you got on your feet. Till Jim gets back, I mean.”

“Jimmy gets back next week. Eric.”

“Next
week
?”

“Think I tell you everything?”

“Well, next week. Then that’s a different story.”

“It’s different, all right. It’s really different.” Quiet, a great muffled quiet. At length: “But I might stay with her a little. If he gets held back. They’re always getting held back. When I talked to him he said he might be extended, actually.”

“You talked to him? When did you talk to him?”

“Really. What’s this Patty person like?”

“If he’s out in Pak on patrol how did he call?”

“She’s not a church lady, is she?”

“Older, and very kindly. And yes, I know her from church. She’ll make you meals.”

“As long as she doesn’t make me pray.”

“She won’t make you pray. She won’t make you do anything.”

“Just so I don’t have to stay with
you.
”

Part Three

Twenty-Nine

IN COLLEGE, ALISON
had been a history/theater double major. These subjects, she felt, comported well with her dream of law. And she’d been the star in a number of musicals, which Eric could still sing, as Alison had so often in good humor sung around her Boston apartment, even acted them for him, the very best of her in the very best moods, often leading to lovemaking, not that that was all he thought about. In Woodchurch, she’d joined the Woodchurch Players and transformed the company, so everyone said, infectious energy and big-city talent, but probably primarily her sly ability to influence Crystal Crudhump, who was the founder, director, and chief benefactor of the Players, a quivering and imperious woman in her late seventies, now dead, famous for thick eye makeup and horrible taste in general and unfortunate casting, also shameless nepotism, the same handful of crotchety thespians in every production, year after year.

But Lady Crudhump, as she was called, had had to give over the role of Marion in
The Music Man,
because Alison could more or less sing and was actually the right age and was finally available, her promotion in Boston having collapsed. And as the theater pendulum swung, perennial leading man and big-hearted pragmatist (not to mention retired druggist) Chip Dennis had suggested in the very first rehearsal that Alison help them find a new Harold Hill, as it was time Carl took over the role of River City mayor Shinn from Bernard Lott, who’d fallen in the lobby of the Woodchurch Retirement Commons and broken his hip.

Eric was no singer, but he was used to standing up in front of people and talking. And so night after night for two months of rehearsals and in practice sessions at home and finally in six sold-out performances, he seduced Madame Librarian, and night after night she fell in love with him, even knowing better, singing everyone into tears.

Their kiss onstage grew steamier performance by performance, until the last night, when the audience actually cheered. “Goodnight, my someone,” Alison would sing in the months after that, calling him up the half stair to their bedroom. “Seventy-six trombones,” he’d sing, which was the counterpoint.

Their harmony often wavered, but they’d never been closer.