Whatever Lola Wants (47 page)

They talked about Theresa, her strengths and limits. “The twins and I bought her a kitten once. She gave it to a neighbor.” She wished her mother well, admired her, after her stroke saw her more often. But didn't know her, wasn't sure if she wanted to, wasn't sentimental about her own childhood. Over fifteen years out of her parents' house. Too much had happened.

He told her about his cleanups. “I've taken some time off, till the end of summer.”

“The work isn't—what? Exciting enough?”

“It demands complete commitment.”

She raised the right eyebrow. “And yours isn't.”

“In the old days I'd start a project and suddenly, ping, I'd be inside it. It would feel like my own long-time neighborhood, I knew it so well.”

“Absorbed.” She nodded. “At the cabin I can get like that, like there's a bigger context and I'm right in it, inside somebody else's world.”

“Yes.” He sipped. A long while since he'd talked like this. Scotch loosening the tongue.

“Last week,” she said, stopped as if deciding whether to go on, then did, “a couple of barn swallows, they were building a nest, feeding. I watched them. For hours. Till I was late for work. They brought back mud and dry grass, it was like I knew where they'd head next, how long till they came back. I couldn't pull away. As if, if I stopped looking there'd be no more reason for them to build the thing. And then I realized I was part of it, they were part of it, but the mud and grass and the insects they were eating were part of it too?”

He nodded. “I get like that when I'm fishing.”

She smiled. “I believe you. Shame.”

“It can be the best of times. Like in the middle of fire and smoke. Only prettier.”

She nodded. “Those dragonflies we watched, I could have stayed with them till they disappeared.”

If he'd not been there, did she mean? “You left.”

“We had to go.”

His right hand rubbed the other wrist: we had to go. “Sometimes, in my work, there's a strange thing that happens.” He found himself telling her about his friend Mot, the warner, the doubt-refuser, who sometimes alerted Carney to instant or impending dangers. He did not tell her whose gift Mot had been. He did say, “Recently Mot's not been around much.”

“Ah.”

Now why did he tell her about Mot at all? “Instead there's something else.”

She waited, watching.

He filled their glasses, sat, leaned back. “Sometimes in a simple action I'd feel clumsy. I mean, in the middle of a cleanup, say. Out of control, right there.” And suddenly he felt out of control now. He'd told no one about any of this, except bits to Bobbie. He tried to stop by taking a sip but his mouth had developed a mind of its own. “If I started to tell somebody what to do next, that was easy. But committing some simple act, I was suddenly awkward.”

“I don't understand. What?”

“Like, say, trying to speak a language with only a couple of tourist phrases.”

“Mmmm.”

“But I'll tell you the opposite. Fishing.” He shook his head, felt a touch of awe. “When I'm out on the water I'm”—he shrugged, and said with no embarrassment—“graceful. It's an elegant thing, the curve of a fly-line, dropping a tiny bit of hair and feather just where I want it.”

“And steel. Don't forget the hook.”

“Ah, but without a barb.”

She smiled.

“It's beautiful, the line floating for a long moment between heaven and water, it creates its own elegance. Like there's a kind of fluency in my muscles and I'm part of the air. You know?” He felt a witless grin but it didn't bother him.

“Is that what
A Ton of Cure
sounds like?”

“Like what?”

“Like how you're talking now.”

Blather brought on by booze. “A little less corny.”

“Why'd you go on the lecture circuit?”

He hesitated. What the hell. “It was a kind of cure for a condition I'd developed.”

“Yeah? What?”

“It's called cricopharyngial dysphasia.”

“I didn't hear right. Better pour me more sour stuff.”

He did. And for himself, the last of it.

“Crico-what?”

“I have to go back. About eight years. Something was wrong but I couldn't figure what. I'd be in the middle of a job, everything going right. Suddenly I'd glance up and see myself. It was like I told you before. I looked ridiculous.”

“I still don't understand.”

“At least strange. Me wearing what looked like a spacesuit in water and muck up to my waist at some river edge, explaining to a dozen people how to scrub oil off a heron's feathers. What the hell could have brought me there?”

“What did?”

“Among other things, twenty years without thinking about why, what for.”

“Maybe you wanted the heron to live.”

“Sure, but it was a lot more complicated. I'd been with a good woman, Lynn, and we broke up. She was deeply hurt. Recriminations by the ton. We were carving flesh from each other's bones. I was drinking too much and eating too much. And one morning I woke up with, I was sure, a bone stuck in my throat. I figured a fish bone, I'd had swordfish the night before.”

Sarah smiled. “Revenge from the deep.”

“No, something else. Be quiet if you want me to go on.”

“Sorry sorry, go on.”

“Well, by the end of the day it was a chicken bone. I could hardly speak and I was worrying about breathing. Alcohol helped.” Carney sipped his whisky sour. “Next day, X-rays, nothing there. I went to a throat man. He nodded wisely and gave it a name, cricopharyngial dysphasia. He said my cricoid, that's a kind of ring-shaped cartilage at the lower part of the larynx, from there to the pharynx, was all out of whack. Under stress the cricoid can tighten up. I'd feel like I was choking, something stuck there. Yes, I said, that was it, that he'd described it dead-on. He told me it used to be called globus, a kind of folk name, these days throat people were seeing a lot of it. And the cure? I shouldn't be so tense. Thanks a lot, I said. He prescribed some little pills, take two when the throat tightens and don't use them while driving.”

Sarah's right eyebrow went up again. Top half of a question mark.

“I took two and fell asleep for fourteen hours. I cut down to a half and used them as little as possible. Then one evening I had a date, somebody new, second date since my break-up. I liked the woman well enough and told her about my cricoid. It used to be called globus, I said. She burst out laughing, funniest thing she'd heard in a long time. The joke? ‘There is some shit you will not eat,' she said to me.”

“She sounds wise.”

Carney nodded. “Globus, she told me, is short for globus hystericus, well known in the nineteenth century. Common 'specially among middle-class women, the children grow up, leave home, the woman finds herself tense to the gills because there's no more purpose to her life. Except these women did have to swallow whatever was dished out. And here it was in my throat, end of the twentieth century, one big globus of stress and no purpose.”

“Stress in macho damage control? I thought stress hit the likes of senior ad men and lady associate directors.”

“And me. And the end of the story is, I began to lessen my time with the Co. and went out lecturing about damage control. That was her idea, my friend's. A way of transforming what I knew, making it useful.”

“It worked?” She touched her whisky glass to her brow.

“Soon as I made my decision my throat cleared a bit, couple of weeks and it was gone. Telling a crowded hall a horror story about a mess keeps it away. The stories became the book.”

“So everything's okay now.”

She was watching his face again, her eyes an invasion. Scotch re-enforced. He felt way more naked than when she'd arrived. She stared in, no words. For self-protection he looked back. Into her eyes, one to the other, the tiniest shift. Not a flicker to hers, they were gray, a flash of green, the center black and exacting. He felt hypnotized.

She drew back, still gazing at him. “How long will they hold our reservation?”

They drove in Carney's Jaguar. A fine evening, the air soft. A large truck in front of them exuded gray fumes. She covered her nose.

“I'll drop back.” He grinned at her.

“We smother nature to death. We turn it into an anthrosphere.”

How quick to shunt away the earlier mood. “What's an anthrosphere?”

“As opposed to biosphere. A world only for humans, not for the rest,” she said. “The Old Testament God wins again. ‘Be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth on the earth.'”

At the Inn the background music was muted, undemanding. The mood soothed. They ordered, tuna for Carney, a vegetable stir-fry for Sarah, and a bottle of Australian Sauvignon Blanc. She relaxed into silence, let her eyes close. Again a lovely woman sat opposite him.

The food arrived. They probed each other's pasts. No, she'd never wanted children, likely too late now. He was relieved he never had any, considering his divorce, his work. In the fall she'd look for another job.

“Tired of the human functions?”

“Just their output.”

“Where'll you look?”

“I don't know. Not in an office or a lab.”

“Something outside.”

She nodded. “That was smart, making a book out of your lectures.”

“You think so?” Right then Carney discovered he wanted Sarah to think the things he had done in his life, and what he believed, were dead-on and smart and important.

“Yeah. Doing something. I should have divorced Driscoll years ago, done something with all that time. We had so little in common. At the end. And in the middle.” She dunked a piece of cauliflower in some sauce and popped it in her mouth. She chewed, mulled, and swallowed.

“What kept you together?”

She shook her head. “There's something about divorce. To me it's like an admission of failure. A car accident killed him. I felt guilty. Not that I could've kept it from happening, just I couldn't figure how to mourn. I learned how little I'd respected his life when his death caused me so little sadness.”

He asked, “And are you unhappy about the other break?”

She squinted at him. “Which?”

“Between you and your mother.”

She thought about this. “Things can change.”

“You felt distant from, uh, your husband”—he nearly said De Skull—“for a long time?”

“Oh, since about when we moved to Boston. I mean, I didn't hate him. And I don't think he had affairs. He was married to his job. He gave me everything, time to find what I should do, what I liked doing, freedom to take the job way up in Durham.”

“Maybe,” Carney said, “these weren't his to give.”

She sat still, staring. Slowly, she nodded.

On her face only the gaze, committing more of him to memory. Mot suddenly said, Pull back. Her eyes held him to her, and—he was struck by this—her search made him shiver.

She lifted her glass. “To you. Thank you.” Her eyes never left his face.

He felt himself slide.

She sipped the last of the wine. “Shall we go?”

He paid. They drove. Neither spoke.

Then from her silence she said, “When I was seventeen I had an abortion.”

They drove on.

“My mother never forgave me. My father— I told them I was pregnant. I took care of it.”

“You were brave.”

“Scared. Good and scared.” She shook her head. “I explained what I'd done. I'd never seen Theresa so devastated. She'd already said they'd raise the baby, she and Milton. I think they never told Leasie and Feasie, or Karl. I certainly didn't.”

They drove, speed unchanging, as on slick ice.

“From fourteen-fifteen on I was pretty wild. Lots of boys. Men.” She laughed lightly. “Theresa forgave me the wildness. And the pregnancy. She didn't forgive the abortion.”

The wheels of the Jag made no sound.

“Later I didn't forgive myself.”

“Why not?”

“I should have respected her stance. I knew what it would be.”

“Hmm.” But does one really, Carney wondered. “And the baby's father?”

“Who it was? I don't know. Three or four possibilities.”

“Hmm.”

“After, I stayed away from sex for three years. A real nun.”

“It must've been”—how not to sound stupid?—“tough.”

“Yep.”

Carney turned toward her. “Sarah—”

Her right eyebrow arched up.

“Thanks.”

She nodded, and they drove. A new kind of silence. They reached his farm, and went into the living room. It had gotten to be eleven-thirty. Carney asked, strange question, “You driving back to the cabin tonight, or going to Burlington?”

She smiled. “I'm staying here.” She gazed at his face, a glance. Then she was kissing him. The gentlest kiss, as if she didn't dare bruise his lips. She drew back. “If you want me to.”

He kissed her. An embrace so right and new he might never have held a woman before.

They sipped armagnac, they laughed, for a time were too drunk or too giddy or too wonderstruck for more. Desire increased its demands, the spell of the other a magnet, a sudden sweet greed. They touched, joined. Afterward they held each other for a long time, and fell asleep. In the morning they did even better.

•

Six of them arrived this time, the Gods Helen, Dante, Dmitri, Elizabeth, Weng, and Edsel himself. They stood in a circle about me. Wherever I turned, one or the other would be facing me. So I stopped turning. I'd deal with the big fella himself. “What d'you want, Edsel?” Silence. “Okay,” I said. I would walk away. What could they do, close in and not let me pass? Grab me and pummel me? These great Gods who'd
AA
ed? Unlikely. I stepped forward, between Edsel and Helen. And all of them moved with me, the circle remained, striding across the clouds. I shifted direction. So did the circle. Simon says. I stopped, I said to Dante, “You Gods are weird.” I sat down. They too sat. Monkey do. I said to Weng, “Having a good time?” Weng said, “Lola.” Amazing! They can speak, too. At least one can. “Ah, Lola,” I said. I looked around me. No Lola, just six seated Gods. I lifted the hem of my robe, flicked away some imagined dust, and looked under. “Nope. Not here.” I checked up my sleeves. “Sorry, not there either.” I picked up a piece of fuzzy cloud and looked into the hole I'd made, shrugged, smiled sadly at Weng and shook my head. I pulled the fuzz apart. “No idea, guys.” I stopped speaking to them. I had nothing to say. I lay flat, and closed my eyes. Gods to watch over me in my sleep. I think after a while they got up, and closed the circle tight by all standing around me, looking down, waiting for what? Lola, springing suddenly from my forehead. She didn't. When I awoke, they were gone.