The Remedy for Love: A Novel (5 page)

Eight

DANIELLE WAS BACK
in the kitchen corner, hacking away with her knife at his block of Parmesan, light of a kerosene lamp. She’d dressed in grimy jeans and an overly large black T-shirt, those beautiful thick wool socks. She was even thinner than he’d thought. “Who buys such stale cheese?” she said.

“Well,” he said. “A lot of people. It’s not that it’s stale.”

“And disposable razors? Aren’t disposable razors a waste of dwindling resources? I would have thought you’d be the guy with a little precious antique straight razor and, like, strop. And so much flour? What do you do with flour? Paper mâché?” No smile. The words kept coming, grew indistinct.

Eric sat up with a start. His pants were thoroughly dry. How long had he been asleep? His socks were dry, too, almost crisp. He struggled into them, said, “All that stuff. I was going to make dinner for someone.” He yawned compulsively. “For Alison.” And yawned again.

Danielle wasn’t there. “You talking to somebody?” she said from above. “It’s okay. That stove takes every stinking molecule of oxygen out of the air. And who is Alison? The one with the ring? Why would you make dinner for her, someone who treats you like that? And anyway, I never trusted a boy who cooks.”

“I haven’t seen her in months, actually. But we talk. I just talked to her last week. A few weeks ago, I should say. Or so.” He yawned again. “We had a long talk. September, I think. We’re separated.”

“So you said.”

“We meet once a month. It’s a ritual.”

She quoted something: “ ‘A ritual to keep me from despair.’ ”

He laughed abruptly, said, “ ‘Paper mâché.’ ”

But she was not to be deflected: “I don’t understand people who break up and then hang out. I’m more full of hate and monstrosity. I mean, if the relationship was any good. But what would I know about that? I’m with Jimmy. And we don’t break up, and we don’t separate. And September is more than a month ago, mister. Are you awake?”

“We’d just have these meals.”

“I swear you were snoring.”

“You can’t trust a boy who cooks. Where does that come from?”

“From boys who cook.”

“Anyway,” Eric said. “She’d relax and I’d relax and we’d get over whatever argument and it would be just like it ever was, only maybe fonder, you know, absence and all of that.” A log collapsed in the fire, pushing hot coals against the very door. Eric opened it and tended things with her poker, so recently stuck in his ribcage. “Very nice, really. Maybe a way of acknowledging all we’ve been to one another.”

“You mean you’d end up naked on the kitchen floor.”

He felt himself flush, but because it wasn’t true, and then he lied: “On the couch, in point of fact.”

“Breakup sex. And then she could go home immediately after and not feel like she owed you anything.”

Eric said, “But not since September.”

“Not since before September.”

He craned to see Danielle in the loft, but her voice was disembodied—nothing to see up there, only the beams of the ceiling and the footboard of an old iron bed by lamplight, Danielle shuffling around, hard at work at something, dressing maybe, or making the bed.

He said, “She had to go to work Monday mornings.”

“You met on Sundays? Who designed that?”

“It was in our separation agreement.”

“How long has it really been?”

“So that’s why I bought all this food.”

“I’m this close to feeling sorry for you.”

Eric said, “There’s such a term as ‘breakup sex’?”

“Such a term, yes, very mainstream. They talk about it on
Oprah
. You should try it sometime. The term, I mean. The sex you’ve done. And where have you been? You don’t have a TV, I bet. Do you even know who Oprah is? You never heard of breakup sex? You buy dinner for someone who isn’t going to show up?”

His cozy little tent crushed under them in firelight on the pond after biking all day. He said, “I wish you’d be nicer. I’m feeling pretty tender.”

“You mean pretty asleep,” she said tenderly. And then she was climbing down the ladder from the loft. She came to him, right to his chair, same shining blue jeans, a different woman, Rasta cap pulled down hard around her face. She said, “Sorry. Honestly. You were nice to me today.”

He couldn’t get off his trajectory: “Alison needs support that I apparently didn’t give her. Which I don’t even know what that means.”

Danielle snorted: anyone knew what that meant. She said, “And then there’s her secret boyfriend. He told her she had to stop seeing you. An ultimatum. Because he knew how much she still loved you. She’d come home to you all flustered and fucked by someone who knew something about her that you didn’t and who she needed to keep just jealous enough to commit, to drop his other girlfriends, like four of them—just what he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do, and just what she’d told herself she didn’t want, some fresh marriage when she’d finally got free. Her therapist is all over her. She’ll dump this guy in another couple of months, you know—but the connection with you, it’s, like,
snap,
and that was the unspoken plan, the work of her sub-brain, back in September though from your face it’s more like July. So for you, of course, it’s: Now what?”

She put one of his logs in the fire. This took some arranging. The firebox was already pretty full, roaring nicely. The wind had died down. The window was black dark.

He said, “You’d make a good summation in court.”

“Well, don’t expect me to swoon over your rock-hard cheese and packets of whatever. Yeast?”

“I was going to make pizza. For Alison.”

“At home. Which is where you should be, liar, eating by yourself.” She limped to the butcher’s block, hacked some more at the cheese. And then she said, “You need to walk out, now. This isn’t Mount Everest. You’ll make it. You’re all warmed up.”

“I won’t make it. Please.”

“You can take the old coat. It’s like a tent. You could live in it.”

“Then you wouldn’t have a coat. And coat or no, it’s dark out there, it’s snowed deep, Danielle. Please. I’ll make dinner for you, a boy who makes you dinner. I won’t drink any wine—you either, no drunken incidents. I’ll sleep on your couch there. I’ll leave at dawn. I just can’t leave now. I will die if I leave now. And I mean that literally.”

“Oh, tell me about it. You really couldn’t break into the vet’s?”

“I crushed my shoulder on that fucking door. I ninja-kicked it over and over again. I ran at it like a linebacker. More than once. I really tried. She’s got like
security
doors.”

Danielle’s posture spoke plainly: she didn’t believe him. “You’d do great in Afghanistan.”

He must have grinned.

Because she was suddenly defensive: “It snows there, too, you know. It snows a lot there, though you think it’s a desert. That’s where Jimmy has been.”

Jimmy. Eric hugged himself. The shoulder really was sore. He said, “In fact, I
was
there. In a manner of speaking. At least in the Persian Gulf. Off Iraq. Between wars. Navy. Fairly luxurious by Army Ranger standards, I realize. Just basically standing on a ship.”

“Navy?” She looked him over critically, not entirely unmoved (judging by her posture, once again, all his years of sorting jurors). Yes, Navy: Navy ROTC at Amherst, then law school, all paid for by the military, then five years in, the minimum, two as a shipboard ensign, three as adjutant spokesperson and analyst on environmental matters at a time when the chiefs of staff wanted real reform, safely between the two Gulf wars. And good things had happened, lots of good policy shifts of which he was part, acknowledgment of global warming, for one thing, a series of desk jobs, all compensated. But he didn’t say any of that, only shrugged.

She didn’t care, said, “Let’s have a look.” She marched to the front door, the one door, pulled it open to a shocking wall of snow, no opening at all, a perfect print of the door with its cross-bracing and big hinges. She punched the top of the drift and made an opening to heavy wind. A plume of dense snow blew in and then a cascade of fine snow off the roof, like two storms. She punched again and broke the opening wider, just more weather to let in, more night. She thrust her face into the wind. Then she shuddered, shoved the door shut, leaned into it, forced the wood-and-leather latch closed with a few punches of her tight little fist.

“Navy,” she said disheartened.

Nine

ERIC MADE HIS
famous pizza dough: flour and cold water, salt, couple tablespoons of the good Tuscan olive oil, two teaspoons yeast, very simple. He liked to cook and, like a lot of people in Woodchurch, where there were no real restaurants, he had gotten pretty good at it during his time with Alison, constant dinner parties. The old cabin stove had a smooth firebrick floor to it and you could move coals around the oven compartment wherever needed, make room for a pizza, perfect. He fed logs and sticks in, gradually brought the temperature up to very hot—pretty pleasant in the snow-swept interior of the cabin. The stovepipe rattled and creaked and pinged with the snow and ice flying into it above the roofline, but no danger of its falling—it had been beautifully installed, someone with great skill, also time on his hands, 1930s no doubt, the last era like this one. The cabin that had seemed so rustic seemed more sophisticated suddenly, craftsmanship and materials better than any you’d find in many a contemporary house.

Danielle was into a second hour of a nap up in her loft, had climbed the ladder in a huff after yet another discussion of Eric’s motives, which, interrogating himself repeatedly, he still found benign: she was a puzzle and interesting to him in the way of puzzles, but he felt no further attraction to her, romantic or otherwise, and of course nothing of the violence she seemed to imply. She didn’t know him. She only knew assholes. She was married and furious and her hair had been rudely chopped off and that was that. But more than a puzzle, a kind of story problem, that intelligence lurking, the fineness back there in her eyes. Something he could do: dedicate the evening to showing her that they could be friends, that in the months or even years to come, he could look the Army Ranger in the eye, shake his hand, be his friend, too. That there were people willing to help you, and no strings attached. If he was anything, he was a guy who wanted to try and help get things sorted out.

Shit, the tomatoes. The tomatoes were at home, last produce of his neighbor’s garden. He pictured them on the kitchen windowsill in sun, carefully ripened post-season and ready for saucing, saved for Alison. Quietly as he could, he searched Danielle’s cabinets for tomato paste, tomato puree, canned tomato sauce, anything. But no. He thought a while, things he and Alison had eaten in Italy, remembered all the various pesti they’d encountered, few to do with basil. Breakup sex. And here he’d thought it was get-back-together sex. What did he know? He had bought kale, and so he fished it out of one of the bags, washed a couple of the big leaves as best he could in the bucket of river water, borrowed a smooth river stone someone had long since put on the windowsill, mashed up the green right on the butcher-block table, mashed in garlic and olive oil and Parmesan and salty sunflower seeds from an ancient snack bag he found, working a little angrily: Danielle wouldn’t recognize the genius of his invention any more than she appreciated his kindness.

But, oh, the pesto was very green and bright. He would spread it on his dough once the yeast had done its work a time or two, then barely cover it with shavings of Parmesan. Unaccountably angry, he pictured Jim in dress uniform, Danielle back to health on Jim’s arm, both of them thankful for Eric’s help, she’d see.

The next sauce was prettier, making use of the bright red peppers he’d picked out at Hannaford, best of the lot, which he oiled and roasted close up against fresh coals, then plunged in her bucket of cold water and peeled, finally mashed smooth in olive oil and garlic. He sliced one of his large onions very thin, sliced one of his eggplants a touch thicker, left the pieces in a puddle of olive oil in a pie pan.

He wouldn’t drink wine. He’d promised Danielle that and she’d been glad. Her history wasn’t hard to read. Alcohol factored in. Likely worse. He conjured a brutal father. But Eric’s teetotaling didn’t mean she couldn’t have wine if she wanted, and both pizzas would go perfectly if differently with the Côtes du Rhône he’d bought for Alison, all to be presented in the most understated way: he wasn’t trying to seduce Danielle and there shouldn’t be any room for her to think so. Thirty-four-dollar goddamn bottle of wine. It was Alison he was angry at. That’s where the anger was coming from. You were supposed to go ahead and feel it.

This was hard for Eric to do, to feel appropriate anger, and knowing that it was hard was a pretty big spurt of growth for him, if he could find a way to give himself credit. Alison had set up the couples counseling and had never attended. So, in effect, once a month, Eric was in therapy. Feel your anger. Give yourself credit. The day would come when the separation would be over. They had a no-fling agreement, which helped with his jealousy of her new life. The separation would be over and either she’d be back or they’d be divorced. And if divorced, then he’d be dating, a strange concept, and painful, yet attached to a kind of excitement. Not that there was anyone in Woodchurch you’d ask out. He tried to recall the feeling of falling in love. Chocolate was supposed to imitate that feeling. Polyphenols related to caffeine, apparently. He’d been web-surfing an awful lot. Scholarly inquiry gone awry. Long articles from scientific journals. Videos of brides dancing with their comical fathers. When he should have been sleeping. With Alison. Who did not live home anymore and who did not attend the couples therapy sessions she herself had arranged and who did not come to their monthly dinners, so it seemed, and who, lately, didn’t answer e-mails or texts and certainly not phone calls. Nor the letter. But that just shouldn’t have been sent: tear-stained legal bond, plain begging.

Once he’d got his sauces made and once the dough was rising nicely, he positioned another pair of logs in the firebox, one thick one from the trunk of the dead maple he’d cut up (way back eons ago, when he still belonged to his real life), one split of birch to keep the first log burning hot. And then he thought to read. Normally, daily, pretty much to the point of obsession, he’d be surfing the Internet at this hour, chasing down some thread of inquiry, sliding through apps on his iPhone. He felt a hunger for that familiar keypad, a kind of mental reaching for his phone even after he’d managed to stop patting his pockets for it. He especially wanted to check the weather app, he told himself, see what the storm had wrought, see what was still expected of it. This was not about Alison, not about whether or not Alison had thought to check in. Talk about appropriate anger. He felt it, all right. His shoulder ached, and he felt that, too. Let the shoulder stand for everything. He’d smashed it into that door at Mia Arnold’s repeatedly. He felt lucky it hadn’t worked. Imagine facing Mia Arnold in the morning!

He could see the corner of a full bookshelf up in Danielle’s loft, but of course there was no way to get near that. By the mission-oak couch in a matching oak cabinet (fine carpentry, old-fashioned click of brass), he found board games and puzzles, also a copy of Thoreau’s
The Maine Woods,
a book you’d find in many a summerhouse in the North Country. He settled in with the kerosene lamp to read about the mountain Thoreau had called Ktaadn.
“Contact!”
he read, the old leather cushions crunching under his every movement, horsehair in there, hard as rock. But quickly he was absorbed: Those canny young men! A century and a half away! Traveling by bateau from Bangor and all the way to the mountain, paddling, carrying, retracing their steps, forging ahead, seventy-five miles or more! He picked up his feet, folded them under him—the floor was all the way icy, but he realized the wind no longer rose up from its many cracks, not at all: the snowfall had already been sufficient to form an insulating barrier. Thoreau’s wonderful figures of speech, the freshness of his mind, the architecture of his thoughts, his people! Eric had forgotten all that.

“Contact!”

He reached for his phone to look up more about the storm. Of course there was no phone. He read a little more Thoreau—competitive young man leaving his companions behind to summit among the rocks of the great mountain. And again checked for his phone, which might have been amusing if it weren’t so pathetic. He opened the cabinet again, that satisfying click. Awkwardly (trying to avoid putting his feet on the icy floor), he pulled out one puzzle then the next, settled on a large one—1000
PIECES
—thick, flaky cardboard probably produced in the 1950s, large photo of Lichtenstein Castle, which he knew to be in Germany.

He and Alison had met as teenagers at a Future Lawyers of Maine retreat on Lake Damariscotta, a high-octane weekend culminating with a moot court. They’d been on the same team, she two years older, very impressive, commanding, intimidating. Years later—they were both already real lawyers—he was solo hiking the Piazza Rock portion of the Appalachian Trail near Saddleback Mountain and recognized her struggling into her backpack in front of the shelter near the massive cantilevered rock. She had no memory of him till he reminded her of a quip he’d made in moot court after she’d warned their team to defer to the bench: “The judge is, like, fifteen.”

Hiking, she was with a group she didn’t like from the office she was tired of, a tax firm in Boston, and walked with Eric hours to the top of the mountain—an incredible granite bald with a view of heaven. Her group was walking out via the ski slopes and so he did, too, and accepted a ride back to his car. The next month, after increasingly warm phone calls between them, he visited her in Boston, tiniest apartment imaginable, Beacon Hill. She met him in front and rode with him to park his car, the shiny VW Golf his father had given him for graduation, pretty small. Still, they managed to get half their clothes off and declare their love and make love in a cheap parking garage she knew. Then again at her apartment in her fresh sheets and with her doleful old dog Bruno watching. They had a natural fit, they agreed. Much later she’d deny saying anything of the sort. He’d found her overly starving and frank and perverse but of course didn’t say it, barely allowed himself to think it, later got over it, got into it, got hurt when she backed away, and backed away further. The jigsaw puzzle had a smell to it that was the smell of that apartment. Dry cardboard, whiff of decay, whiff of mold, and a kind of perfume: old bar of travel soap tucked into the box, probably someone’s effort at mouse proofing.

He dumped the thousand pieces on the coffee table and searched out the edges. The soap wrapper said Hotel Myron, Milwaukee. Earlier vintage even than the calendar in the shed. A series of thuds hit the side of the house, like car doors slamming in the driveway, if there’d been a driveway: snow bombs off the high trees all around in the wind. The front window out onto the view of the river was picturesque in the lamplight, a skein of snow stacked in its lower edges and across the bottom occluding a quarter of the big pane of glass, not that there was anything to see in the dark.

Alison’s body was. It was. It was hers, that’s what it was. She lived in it easily. Sumptuous, full, tending toward plump, bigger toward the bottom, Reubenesque. The sandwich, not the painter, as her unkindly father had once observed, not joking. That next morning, the Boston morning, she standing in the doorway to the minuscule kitchen, her back to him, intent on a phone conversation. Bent to a phone conversation. Back when phones had wires. Something she didn’t understand about young men in love: her body that morning as she talked on the phone was easily the most beautiful vista he had ever encountered. That included all the great wonders of the world—Grand Canyon, Great Wall of China, Costa Rican rain forest, everything. The sight of her naked in that doorway and bent to the phone conversation—it was in his collection for life, one of the small number of visions a person can call up at will and see with the kind of clarity not even the present moment ever offered. And that morning she’d hung up the phone and turned and come to him in her small bed.

He got the border all built, sky and garden, and was starting on some of the castle turrets when he heard Danielle cough and sigh and stretch. She must be as ready for dinner as he. He left the puzzle as it was (hearing in his head Alison’s voice making fun of him for starting it), found his dough nicely expanded. He gently divided it, caressed it, shaped it into two balls, then back to the puzzle. While the dough rested he got the entire roof outline of the castle—not too difficult, all this pointy architecture against the blue, blue Bavarian sky. Danielle was stirring in her blankets, rustling, sighing, yawning. She wasn’t in any hurry to get up, it seemed. He didn’t think Alison had ever taken a nap, someone who hated vacations unless they involved extreme sports: deepwater scuba, cloud-trekking, kickboxing lessons, breakup sex.

Hurrying, he added wood to the fire, banked his beautiful coals—very hot in there—then searched the shelves and cabinets and half-broken drawers for candles, which he found, a box of votives. He lined up four of them on the butcher’s block and put a wooden match to them. Still not enough light, which was all he was seeking, certainly not atmosphere, if that was what Danielle was going to accuse him of. In the lambent glow he dredged the eggplant slices in flour, slipped them into the oven in their pie pan, patted out the dough balls with his palms on the floured butcher’s block, the only real work surface. And, oh, it was a good thing he had something to do, Danielle out of her bed now and apparently dressing, subtle zipper sounds, several different pairs of pants coming off and on, soft humming. He twirled the first circle of dough up on his fists, thinning it, not really showing off, as of course she wasn’t paying any attention and would only mock him in any case, twirled the second circle even higher, let it land on the cutting board he’d improvised—just a well-worn piece of plywood he’d floured heavily and that could serve as a peel as well. He spread the brilliant red-pepper sauce thinly on the dough, grated a layer of Parmesan, placed the slices of onion, drew the eggplant out of the oven and apportioned it neatly. One more shower of Parmesan. He floured a peculiar antique cake knife (handle real ivory, it looked like) and used it to loosen the dough on the plywood. Finding everything ready, he jerked the pizza off the board and onto the hot oven bricks, clanked the door shut.