The boy floated with the newts in the dark water of the pond. The points of the pines scorched the sky and a hawk slowly circled the sun. In the shallows, the two dogs were islands of red-gold snout, spine, tail; up in the great house, the women were drinking cold gin from teacups, the men resting naked in shuttered bedrooms under the wind that roared from box fans.
The boy had lain all afternoon in the pond, so long that he was sure the water had entered his brain through his ears and had washed all thought out. He was as dumb as the newts all around him with their fat bellies and splayed limbs. He would lie here suspended beyond the tense hot afternoon and into the dusk with fireflies, he would lie here into the night, into the dawn, into the rest of the summer and the fall with the surface of the pond scummed with red maple leaves and the winter with the cold slowing him until his heart beat once a day and the ice covered him gently as with a thickness of glass. It would be a good life, this life of newt. He would be held up by the dark brown water that lapped at him, that asked nothing at all of him.
Suddenly, out of the sky there fell a fist-size stone that gulped the water close to his head. Another, closer. He rolled upright.
His sister was at the end of the dock and the afternoon sun shone through her pale dress and pricked out her new bony body, shone her hair into a fireball around her head.
Oh, he thought; she has come back to him, his first friend, his Libby as she’d been before she went off to the family school and was earthquaked into this new strange creature of sharp bones and secrets, eating only apples, her eyes made enormous without glasses. The mean new Elizabeth would not throw stones as a joke, but his beloved gawky Libby would, and help him build forts in the woods and play Uno with flashlights and get him up early so they could run across the lawn still draped in morning fog and sear their feet with dew to giddy pain.
Chip, his sister was yelling. Come up. It’s time.
As he neared and lunged as though to grab her feet, however, he saw the reversion was a trick, Libby was gone for good, angular Elizabeth had long ago eaten her. She stepped away from his grabbing hands. Her mouth was slack, her shoulders loose, and in them he saw that she’d been stealing sips of gin from the women, even though she was only fifteen. She said, in their grandmother’s clipped voice, Tell that child to come up and wash himself thoroughly, and with soap, for I will not have pond stink at my Independence Day supper. She smiled, pleased with herself.
How is it? he said. Up there. With Mom.
Shit show, she said, and showed her teeth and began to walk tenderly up the lawn because she was barefoot and there was a shimmering cloth of bees above the clovers in the grass.
The dogs pulled themselves wearily from the water, shook rainbows from their fur. His body felt exquisite in the heat after so long in the water, skinless and stripped to nerves. He led the dogs the distance up to the house and left them at the door to the center hall, though he was forbidden to use it when wet. For a moment, his dazzled eyes did not make out Bear standing there, frowning at the newspaper folded in his hands, but then his grandfather cleared his throat and Chip’s eyes adjusted and Bear gave him an ostentatious wink and the boy ran up one curve of the stairs and all the way to the children’s wing where his clothes lay like a second, overly starched Chip upon the bed. He could not bear to think of showering off the pond’s dark magic and so he put these awful clothes on next to his skin. When he looked down into the hall again, Bear had retreated, and so Chip slid down the bannister and leapt off before the finial with its carved pineapple came up fast and clocked him in the groin.
As he passed through the dining room, he saw the caterer with a sheet of light in her hands at the far end, which even as he watched became only a shining membrane of plastic wrap. Her shirt was sweated through and he saw her beige bra biting into the flesh of her back. He should have looked away, he understood this although he was only ten, but he stopped and stared. She turned around and frowned at him, flicking him away with her eyes, and he ran out to the terrace, straight into his dread.
There the women sat in their corners. His grandmother Slim, in her wicker chair spread all around her in a glorious peacock design, his mother, Julia, knotted in her chair with his sister, Elizabeth, perched on the arm beside her, Aunt Diana talking as always, a chunk of amber as large as a baby’s fist at her neck catching the sunlight and shining. The story was that Uncle Charley had rescued Diana from a yoga studio when he married her, which explained why she was always saying the kind of thing that she was saying now, Surely the desert is haunted, but in a very special way, you can feel the ghosts just rolling across it like tumbleweeds whenever the sun goes down and the moon rises and the wind dies out, that’s when they come out, the ancient ghosts that don’t care about anything so paltry as the human, something to do with magnetism, the veins of electricity in the bedrock or something, or the spirits of the stones themselves moving in their infinitely slow way. She laughed.
His mother’s eyes had found Chip. She was commanding him to come near. He sat on her lap, though her leg bones were hot and trembling. She held him around the middle and pressed her face into his back. Slim’s roses were so lush on the trellises shadowing the veranda that the perfume was a thick invisible wall.
The dogs, having seen Chip come out, tried to climb up to him from the lawn but Slim grimaced at their wet fur and growled, Down, and they slunk back to the shade of the apple orchard beside the perennial gardens.
Well, isn’t it hot, Slim said, interrupting Diana, which wasn’t counted as rude because nobody ever listened to Diana, the whole family interrupted her, it was fine. Bear emerged with a frosty shaker in his hand and bent to refresh the ladies’ drinks. I’m getting soused! Diana said. Elizabeth held up her iced tea for a splash, and Bear chuckled and poured a little. Slim looked at Chip’s mother to see how she would protest, but their mother’s face was buried in Chip’s back, and so Elizabeth was allowed her gin, and Slim’s disapproval with her daughter, Chip’s mother, passed into the continuous unspoken, the family’s syntax of silence.
Now the caterer came out with an apron to cover her sweated-through shirt, and said, I’m finished, ma’am.
Thank you, Jolene, Slim said. She closed her eyes and tilted her face to a strip of sun; she did not believe in tipping.
And when the woman twisted her red hands in her apron, and did not move, and then as the seconds ticked on and the woman folded her mouth into a determined slit, Slim said, Oh, are you still here? Well. Surely your family misses you. Have a lovely Independence Day.
When the caterer left, Bear followed her out, because one of his family jobs was to stealthily fix what Slim in her imperiousness broke; he would tip well.
When Bear returned to the veranda, Uncle Charley was behind him; and Chip had to stifle a laugh, because they were both sunburned from the morning’s golf, both in pink shirts, his uncle was just a smaller, plumper, blonder version of his grandfather. But, then again, so was Chip, the youngest of these three Charleses. He wondered if each younger Charles always came out a little worse than the one before, going back all the way to the very first Charles who had come to Boston from England and made the family very very rich oh ages ago. He hoped not. Then he made a fervent wish inside himself that Uncle Charley and Aunt Diana would have the baby they were working so hard to make, and that it would be a boy and that they would name him Charles, and he would become the true Charles of the generation, so that Chip could be released from this string of diminishment, could become something separate from the rest. By the sadness in Aunt Diana’s face, the baby wouldn’t be coming soon.
Uncle Charley took the bourbon his father poured him, and took a gulp and coughed and said, Are we still waiting for Flippy?
Everyone knew: drinks were at five, and supper was at six, for eating too late in the day undermined the proper workings of the tripes, as Slim always said.
Why would he come? Elizabeth said. I’m sure he’s super pissed.
Chip’s mother twitched under him, and he felt her face move against his back, perhaps into a smile. Slim glinted dangerously at her granddaughter and swallowed the girl’s impertinence up with a laugh.
And so they waited, and into the waiting Diana spoke of high colonics and the concept of nirvana and Slim spoke approvingly of Nancy Reagan’s shoes and hair, and Bear genially told stories of his family’s eccentrics, the granduncle who married a Paris cancan dancer, the great-grandmother who ran away on her wedding day and was discovered in a house of disrepute in New Orleans, but who was returned to her life and had six children and became an exemplary philanthropist, putting her name on a concert hall in Boston. From the stereo system, the music poured low, Rachmaninoff, the afternoon settled, the shadows stretched and darkened on the lawn. In the little village down the hill early fireworks burst even though it was still too light to see them. The dogs came around to the kitchen door, and the housekeeper brought them in and fed them then released them back into the evening, then brought the family little bowls of hot nuts on a tray. And still Flip did not come.
At last, at seven, Slim said, Well, my youngest has always been his own man. To supper we go. And they all followed her into the dining room, Diana wobbly in her heels from the gin.
There were tiny flags on the buffet, a whole poached salmon under cucumber scales, a bowl of fresh mayonnaise, a salad wilted from the wait, hard rolls, little pats of butter molded into stars on mostly melted ice. The housekeeper had folded the red-and-white-striped napkins into patriotic swans. The family filled their plates in silence and sat at the overlong table. Chip’s mother took nothing, and put her children on either side of her. Chip could feel her body trembling through the legs of her chair, over the floorboard, and up his own chair’s legs, into his body.
When everyone had taken a seat, Bear stood up and smiled genially at the head of the table and lifted his glass and cleared his throat, and here was the awful moment coming, Chip closed his eyes and took his mother’s damp tight fist in his hand, and this was when they all heard an engine roaring, the sound of wheels spinning too fast through gravel and music thudding inside a car, Flip’s car, at last; Uncle Flip had finally come.
How very like my boy, Slim said icily. To arrive only when we’d given up all hope for him.
They listened as the engine shut off, the car doors shut, the footsteps nearly running over the gravel, the great hall door opened and slammed, shaking the chandelier above the dining table into a wild tinkling. And here was Flip in the doorway, shouting, Hallooo, hallooooo. He was sweaty, his hair in stiff spikes and his eyes protuberant. Chip heard his sister hiss and say under her breath, Jesus, coke much?
Behind him, hesitantly, there appeared a woman. She was very tall, at least Bear’s height, and her enormous cascade of black curls fell to her abdomen. She was wearing a star-spangled miniskirt and a sequined red top, her face heavy with makeup, red lipstick, blue eyeshadow, but she was not at all pretty, with the bridge of her nose like a knot between her close-set eyes and a huge jaw that reminded Chip of a bulldog’s. She was older than Flip, closer to Chip’s mother’s age.
Hi, she said softly, and held up a six-pack of beer.
How lovely, Philip, you brought someone, Slim said and did not stand or reach out for the beer.
Family, I’d like to present my lovely friend I just met down at the pizza joint in the village, what’s your name again?
Pearl Spang, the woman said softly, and put the beer down on the buffet. I thought you said this was going to be a cookout, Philip.
Pearl Spang, what a wonderful name! Flip said.
You are welcome here, Pearl, Uncle Charley said in his new unctuous voice.
And how very festive you look, Slim said, and the corner of her mouth twitched.
Please, Pearl, eat eat eat, Flip said, gesturing at the buffet, and Pearl obediently turned to fill a plate. Flip pulled a chair out, spun it around so it faced backward, and straddled it. He looked at Chip’s mother, and she looked back, and between the brother and sister there ran such a dark electricity that Chip for the first time during this long, strange day felt scared.
Don’t let me interrupt you, Bear, Flip said. Looks like you were about to give a big old speech there.
Pearl Spang carried her full plate to the empty chair next to Chip, and sat, and her perfume, musky and warm, went up his nostrils, he could taste it, and he closed his eyes to smell it deeper. A curious thing happened in his body, something like a wave crashed through it. Beside his own untouched plate, for it was only good manners to refrain from eating until all the speeches had been spoken, he saw the bright nails and the broad hands rapidly spearing fish, lifting the bites, bringing the clean tines back down to the plate; he could hear Pearl chewing and feel her warmth emanating toward him, but he could not look at her face.
Bear hefted himself to his feet again, and raised his glass. I was about to say before you arrived, Flippy, how grateful I am to be gathered here today, on the birthday of our great nation, at our old estate, with my beloved family. And new friends, Bear said, winking at Pearl.
Bear said how glad he was that the family showed its solidarity by coming. It could not have been easy to wake up to the news, and Bear was angry, really quite quite quite angry that the Globe had published it a week before he had put the final plans in place, but you can’t trust a journalist farther than you can throw one, ha ha, and quite obviously Bear and Slim were committed to equality between all three of their children, they would certainly balance the scales and make sure Philip and Julia were given equal portions of the family fortune in the will to make up for the imbalance, and none of this should be seen as a referendum on who is the favored child or who is loved more, or any such nonsense as that. Of course not. Oh, no, this was simply business. Bear and Slim had had many long years of discussions, a great deal of heartache, you better believe it, but in the end they felt it was right that Charles become C.E.O. of the bank, which, of course, bears his name.
To all of my brilliant children, Bear intoned, raising a glass, but today is Charles’s day, so to Charles today. Only Slim and Diana raised theirs, smiling. Uncle Charley was flushed, his eyes gleaming with pleasure.
Pearl’s plate was already half empty; on the other side, his mother’s breathing had become ragged. Her nails pressed into Chip’s hand and burned but he didn’t withdraw.
Truly, Uncle Flip said in his unnaturally high and fast voice, what an unbelievably Waspy thing to do, how passive-aggressive can you get, telling two out of three children they’ve been disinherited in the business pages of the Boston Globe.
Oh, don’t be so dramatic, Flip, Slim said. Nobody is disinherited.
Ah, dramatic, Flip said, what a perfect word, it’s true there’s little more dramatic than waking up to find that your older brother who knows nothing at all about banks has been given everything. Charley, who, and forgive me, I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s the truth, is by far the least qualified of the three of us. A sports agent. You put a motherfucking sports agent in charge of a three-hundred-year-old bank.
The skill set is transferable, Charley said in a tight voice.
While I, Flip said, speaking over his brother, am the only one with an M.B.A. and have been at the bank for five years and know it like the back of my hand. But fuck me, when poor Julia has been at the bank for twenty years, Julia, who came up through the mail room as a high schooler, which, I’ll remind you, Bear never made Charley and me do, of course, when Julia, who worked her way to V.P. on her own merit, sacrificing her own sweat and tears and missing her kids’ childhoods and losing even her marriage to the bank, Julia, who is the oldest and the smartest and the one who deserves it the most, gets nothing. Nothing for Julia! Zilch! Zero! Nothing but the morning paper telling her that her intelligence and work mean literally nothing to this family because she had the misfortune of being born with a cunt. And because Charley, forgive me, but the family fucking idiot, is the one with the name.
Ad hominem. Extremely unfair, Charley said.
Let’s all take a few cleansing breaths, Aunt Diana whispered.
It is exactly this behavior that disqualified you, Philip, Slim said. You are simply too flamboyant, it’s a matter of our clients’ comfort, that they can see themselves in the captain of the ship. You and Julia are frankly impossible. Among the three of you, only Charley could possibly make them feel secure.
Just imagine what our clients’ wives would think if their husbands went off to play golf with Julia every weekend. And you don’t even play golf, Flippy, Bear said.
Besides, Slim said. Your . . . Well, your tastes, Philip. We’ve never said anything. Live and let live, this is our motto. But imagine the scandal if it got out.
Flip blinked slowly. Slim’s frown faded and a softness came into her face as she looked at him, her youngest child, the one who looked the most like her. At last Flip said, You know? You’ve known?
Oh, please, Slim said, I am your mother. Since you were born.
I mean, you had a life-size poster of Paul Newman on your closet door when you were twelve, Uncle Charley said, chuckling.
My goodness, Diana said into the new and ringing silence. If it matters at all to you, Flip, I never even suspected.
Beside Chip, Pearl Spang bent over, and the ends of her long black curly hair brushed Chip’s thigh, and she removed her high heels with both hands, and stood, barefoot, then backed away from the table, snagging the six-pack of beer as she passed the buffet, and stepped through the doors to the veranda and there was swallowed up by the twilight.
I think I’m going crazy, Uncle Flip said at last, tugging at the shocked ends of his hair. This is insane. I’m going insane.
This whole family is fucking crazy, Elizabeth said, slurring her words.
Language, Elizabeth, Uncle Charley said; and, with this, Elizabeth took the hard roll from her plate, and threw it at him so quickly that it bounced off his sunburned forehead, though the pat of butter in the shape of a star stuck on his skin and slowly began to slide down.
Then, into the shocked silence, Elizabeth said, We’re going, Mama, and pulled their mother up out of her chair, then out the door into the hall, and Chip ran after, grabbing their mother’s pocketbook from the closet, and then they, too, had passed through the vast doors into the breathing heat of evening, the navy sky with the hanging moon, the frog song rising from the pond, the distant crackle of fireworks down the mountain. Elizabeth put their mother into the passenger seat, and, though she was only fifteen, and rather drunk, she started the car and drove it, bucking and squealing, down the gravel circle, down the drive, and out onto the dirt road where the eyes of night creatures peered greenly out of the thickening dark.
Elizabeth stopped the car in the pull-off before the road that ran down the mountain into the village, leaned her head against the steering wheel, and sobbed dryly.
I hate them, Elizabeth said at last.
I know, honey, their mother said. Me, too.
Chip looked at his mother, who seemed strong now, and calm. Her chin was jutted and dangerous. She looked a great deal like Slim.
Eventually, his mother and sister switched seats, and their mother put the car in gear again, and they glided out into the road.
When they were moving, something horrifying rose up from very deep in Chip’s body, something he tried to push down again, and he couldn’t help himself; he put his hands over his mouth, but the laughter was stronger than he was, it came out of him choking and awful.
Elizabeth turned and frowned at him, then the old Libby smile came over her face. Uncle Charley, she said. The butter slipping down. And then she too started to laugh.
Now even their mother was laughing. I’m starving, she said at last when she calmed. We’ll stop and get a slice of pizza in town. But this made the kids laugh even harder.
Pizza. Pearl Spang, Elizabeth gasped. That fucking six-pack.
And this way down they went on the road twisting through the forest, and a firework burst up from the lake every so often and lit the tops of the trees in pink and orange and green and gold. Chip wiped his face on his sleeve. Out in the thickness of the woods, on the hiking trail that connected Maine to Georgia, which ran beside the road here, he caught a glimpse of a shadow moving quickly, a flare of red sequins in the headlights, but then the car moved on and all was dark and hidden in the woods again.
Chip’s mother never returned to the bank; with lethal silence, she started up her own firm, taking a dozen of the bank’s more progressive clients with her. She put everything she had into it and had to sell the lovely white house on Beacon Hill, and Chip and she moved into a little condominium with beige carpets in the North End. Uncle Flip went west to Hollywood to be a producer, Elizabeth back to boarding school, which Slim and Bear still paid for, although neither Elizabeth nor Chip’s mother was speaking to them. Only Chip fielded the phone calls, awkward, monosyllabic, for fear his mother would overhear and be hurt. But she was hardly ever around, and, on weekdays, Chip walked to school, walked back, did his homework with the television on, reheated what the house cleaner left for his supper, put himself to bed. On weekend mornings, he waited on the hall floor outside his mother’s room until she came out in her mint-green kimono, mascara smeared under her eyes.
It was with a sense of relief all around that Chip went off to the family boarding school as a freshman. Elizabeth was a senior, her bony face gentling whenever she saw her brother. Her smile blazed up into his solitude and warmed him.
Time sped up, blurred. Bluestone chapel in the mornings, blue blazer, blue ink in the exam books, lonely blue mornings full of fog. His mother’s letters arrived on Tuesdays, the phone calls with Slim and Bear were scheduled on Sunday nights on the hall phone for exactly four minutes, mostly taken up with news of intramural lacrosse though Chip wasn’t very good, being plump and slow and uncoördinated, and in return Slim and Bear told him what animals they had seen on their hikes in the desert where they had moved, coyotes, roadrunners, javelinas. The summer was split between the family estate with the pond the forest the hikes up the mountains, cocktail hour, a figure in the far fields, walking swiftly, a dog leaping at its feet, the housekeeper’s hot nuts, and the woozy hot days in Boston, the empty condominium. Then one week just before school in August at their father’s in the Caymans. Their father had become, as Elizabeth said, a tax pirate. He looked like one, all ruddy with sun and drink, seemingly unable to place his children when they came into the room. Boarding school again, dimmer now without Elizabeth in it to shoot him a smile, she being in freshman year at the college the family had gone to for centuries, and the one good moment of his week was opening his mailbox to find her letter in it, thick and funny and slightly smelling of apples. College was good for her, she loved it, she got a nose ring, she partied in the city, she now had a girlfriend, yes she was a lesbian. Uncle Flip has just been so supportive, she wrote, but don’t tell Mama, yet; Elizabeth wanted to come out to her in person. Just as the snow melted, she wrote for him to spend the summer with her and her friends on Martha’s Vineyard, they’re all getting restaurant jobs, and he, thinking of the empty condo, the family estate with Slim and Bear slowly getting potted from 5 p.m. on, said hell yes and came out to the island and slept on a blowup pool float for two months. Boats in the bay and jugs of cold wine in the fridge, and girl panties in the bathroom drying on the line, and noises from the bedrooms late at night that made him burn with hunger and embarrassment. Chip’s forearms chiselled from scooping ice cream out of rock-hard containers all summer. The tacit understanding was that Chip and Elizabeth did not have to visit their father in the Caymans this year, and they were a little hurt when he didn’t press the issue. Back to junior year with sun streaks in his hair, the acne gone from the sea salt and tan, and, surprise! Chip was suddenly sort of popular. All you have to do is say nothing and laugh at everything and you get a reputation for being jolly. House parties, ski trips, weekends at second houses in Nantucket, third houses in the Berkshires, penthouses in Manhattan, nightclubs everywhere, fake I.D.s, molly and pot and vodka in his orange juice in the back of history class. One morning, a blurry memory of girl legs, a bared breast, a smeared mouth, weeping, just some townie whose face he couldn’t remember, and his friends a little awkward when Chip came into the room but soon class solidarity flowed around him again like water. He was hungover for his SATs, they were so awful that Bear talked to him in a sad voice and Slim hired him a daily tutor and promised a BMW for hitting 1350, a Mercedes for more than 1400. On his third try, he got a 1320, and they relented and gave him a car; it was only a Volvo, but it was new. Another summer on the Vineyard. He was a barback at his sister’s restaurant, there were parties every night after closing, cigarettes in the alleyway, Bloody Marias for hair of the dog when the sunrise sent swords into his eyes. Senior year, parties and sleeping during calculus, and, on the phone one Sunday, Bear cleared his throat and said, I’m so sorry your grades are not what we would expect for you to follow your sister, well, to follow the whole family, to the college, and you may want to look at less challenging schools, Chippy. But Slim said sharply on the other line, Charles, are you utterly insane? He’s a legacy a hundred times over and there is nothing that the right donation cannot do. And, as usual, Slim was correct. He was accepted with his mediocre SATs and grades, even though the class valedictorian, a girl who was captain of three sports and had perfect SATs, was not, and when she was told she would not be let in off the wait list, she began to ugly cry in chapel and had to be led out by her friends and comforted under the apple trees just then blowing their white petals everywhere. Prom, a blurry boob unearthed from blue chiffon, Martha’s Vineyard. His sister staggering home, and against the rising sun she seemed transparent, she had so little flesh upon her bones. The Caymans, their father deflated, leathery, dating a girl younger than Elizabeth. Chip had forgotten how utterly spiky Elizabeth could be. Their father’s girl vanished and was not seen again during their stay.
College was all new until the second week. Chip moved himself shyly through the days, and then it was simply prep school all over again in a different place. Same old faces, same old parties, same beer pong and midnight pizza, ecstasy and blow and Adderall and pot, someone’s dad’s box at the Celtics, someone’s house on the Cape. He saw Elizabeth every Sunday for brunch until he slept through two in a row and she took to barging into his dorm with bagels and coffee to make sure he was alive, not that his sister would ever eat a bagel. She had become so skinny that she worried him; he was afraid the wind off the Charles would snap her like a stick of chalk. Spring break at their father’s in the Caymans because he was getting married suddenly, small wedding, but Elizabeth was not there in the sun and heat with Chip, and their mother was not there, either, although things had grown cordial between his parents, and it was only when Chip flew back to freezing Boston that he found out Elizabeth had collapsed in an elevator, was in a hospital, was being force-fed and was too embarrassed to see him, though Slim and Bear came to visit her every day and, through these visits, their mother began speaking to her parents for the first time since they’d made Charley head of the bank. Elizabeth did her schoolwork in the hospital, returned to her courses with a vengeance, graduated summa, began to work at their mother’s firm. Their mother with a sleek angular new haircut and eyes made up smokily; oh, how his women are so beautiful, Chip thought, as his mother and Elizabeth came laughing together into the restaurant for their weekly Thursday dinner. He saw his mother as young enough to marry again, and felt a little strange about the idea. Your sister is a superstar, their mother said over appetizers. A natural. A genius. She raised her glass of champagne, and Chip and Elizabeth raised and downed their own.
His grades weren’t great but were good enough. Martha’s Vineyard in the summers, but there was better pay working in construction there for his buddy’s uncle than as a barback, and he learned to demolish, tile, build, and roof. He graduated, no honors, but with an extensive group of friendly acquaintances. His mother did not offer him a job and he did not think he should have to ask. Uncle Charley eventually did. Chip was summoned to lunch on his first day, and sat across from his uncle, both with their napkins tucked into their collars, and his uncle looked at him kindly over his glasses as they ate lukewarm clam chowder. At least I got one of you kids over here. Your sister is a tough one, he said. Refuses, though we’d give a two-hundred-per-cent raise. And it’s looking less and less likely Diana and I will be having kids of our own, you know, she’s getting past the point where it makes any sense to keep on and the doctors haven’t helped in years. Years and years. Heartbreak. In any event, looks like you’re what we’ve got. So work hard, Chippy. Keep your head down. You’ll be the pride of the family yet, won’t you? You’ll make us all proud, my boy.
Sure, Chip said, feeling warm. Of course he would make his family proud, he had no choice, after all. Everything had been decided for him long before he was born.
Chip liked his job fine. He liked his co-workers, they were low-key buddies, they drank together every night, went to each other’s weddings, and, when some left the bank to do other things, they fell easily and without too much fuss out of one another’s lives. Some of the guys he started with were promoted, even though Chip was not, but it was certainly, he was sure, because Uncle Charley and Bear didn’t want to make the very public mistake of nepotism. He bought a condo he barely lived in, saw women who were just a little not right enough to introduce to his sister and his mother: too plain, state-school graduate, only an admin assistant. They never lasted very long and were gone in a month or so. There were three years of this, four years. Once there was a bad story, a girl invited home when they were both too drunk to see straight, something happened in the bedroom that Chip honestly didn’t remember, waking to pain then the police, charges brought, only to be dropped when Slim stepped in, and Chip was let off, and it all passed into the perpetual unspoken. The family pressed closer around Chip, it seemed, wary and concerned.
Then his mother married abruptly, a bald man aptly named Rich who cycled hundreds of miles a week and was as slender and elegant as a crane. Elizabeth and Chip stood outside the courthouse and kissed their mother’s cheeks on which were mixed the warm spring rain and her tears, and Elizabeth rested her head on Chip’s shoulder as they watched the taxi whisk their mother and her new husband away through the wet gray streets. I’m happy, their mother had whispered to them over her corner-kiosk lilies, oh, kids, I’m so happy, and I had given up on happiness long ago. I didn’t think it was for me. Then she was gone and it was her happiness that lingered on the street with them, that made them feel shy and embarrassed.
Celebratory drink? Chip said. He saw Elizabeth so little these days. She had taken up marathon running and worked all the time, even the weekends. He thought hopefully of a corner booth, bourbon, Elizabeth’s devil taking over and her scalding mimicry of their family, Slim’s clipped scorn and Bear’s slow geniality and Diana’s airy sadness and Flip’s manic and scattered brilliance. But his sister sighed and rubbed her face. Oh, Chippy, I don’t drink anymore. It just exacerbated everything.
Chip laughed, because this was absurd, and then he saw she was serious.
But you’re not an alcoholic, he said. You’re totally normal.
She shivered and pulled her scarf closer to her neck, and said, Yeah, well, in a family where alcoholism is the norm, normal isn’t good. She kissed him, and looked at him as though she was about to say more, and so he turned and hurried away, shouting over his shoulder to have her assistant call him to schedule lunch sometime this week. There was a time when he would have let her boss him, would have allowed her to tell him that maybe he should stop drinking, he had a problem, he’d missed two business lunches in the past month because he’d had Bloody Marys for breakfast and wound up sleeping at his desk. One of the funny family stories was that when he was still crawling, she’d begged for a collar and a leash and put it on him, and for a long time he thought he was a puppy, and sat when she told him to sit, rolled over at her command. Now he was a grown man, twenty-five, no puppy; he had learned the art of slipperiness when things became too heavy for him to hold.
Six months after their mother’s wedding to Rich, Chip’s desk phone rang, and his uncle asked him to come up to his office. Chip tried to play it cool, but this was certainly his promotion, at long last he could pay off his credit-card debts, rent a place on the Vineyard for a few weeks next summer, and pay back the friends who had spotted him all these years. He composed his face in the shining brass of the elevator doors, pressed his fair thinning curls down, brushed the bagel seeds off his suit jacket, and frowned to make his soft face look older than it was.
When he came into his uncle’s office, Charley was leaning back in his chair and Bear was standing at the window. His grandfather turned and silently opened his arms for a hug, and Chip felt like a child again, engulfed by Bear’s warmth and expensive pine-and-leather cologne. His grandfather’s Arizona tan was so deep that his crow’s-feet were white rays around his eyes.
Chippy! Uncle Charley said. Sit, sit. Chip sat, blood thudding in his ears. Bear returned to the window to face Boston, the chip of slate that was the harbor; it felt strange to Chip that his grandfather was turning his back on him.
Before we begin, you need to know that we have a plan, don’t worry, you’re family. You will always, always be taken care of, Uncle Charley said, tenting his hands over his belly. The October sun in its sideways tilt through the window shone through his sparse hair. You’re like the son I never had. All this to say that Bear and I gave you four years, kid, but we just don’t think you’re cut out for banking. Your numbers are just not there. I’m sorry.
Funny business this, Bear said. You’ve got to act like a trained dog, but be a wolf inside. Turns out you’re no wolf, buddy.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing, Charley said. You’ll probably have a better life, to be honest. We just have to find a position in the company where you’re a better match. We were thinking in the real-estate division. It’s all people skills, which you’re good at, and the lawyers are the ones doing the tricky stuff under the surface.
Chip’s mind, which had slowed in surprise, finally caught up. He clutched his hands and said, You’re firing me?
Oh no. No no no, Uncle Charley said with a pained smile. Just moving you along to where your gifts can shine.
You’re firing me, Chip said. Plus you’re calling me stupid.
No, you’re not stupid, Bear said with his chuckle. Just perhaps not as motivated as you might be in the position where we first put you.
Chip could feel the tears rising behind his eyes. To save himself, he stood abruptly and walked fast to the elevator, and the doors slid open even as his uncle stood and called after him and a rare anger passed over Bear’s face. Then the doors closed, and Chip descended.
He left everything in his cubicle, the overcoat and scarf and attaché case, all of which were expensive gifts from Slim, and breathed the cold air on the sidewalk for a time. The sunlight off the grass of the Common was far too bright in his eyes. It felt like an assault. People all around were moving too fast, and there should have been noise, car noise, plane noise, noise of music and voices, but there was nothing, everything was dulled and silent.
He walked as fast as he could, stopping to buy two handles of bourbon, and, once home, stripped to his underwear, pulled down the shades, and fell into obliteration.
His sister gave him three days. On the third, she let herself in with her key. She gagged, then threw open all the windows and stood angrily in her tight pants suit, fists on hips, surveying the chicken-wing bones, the ice-cream pints abandoned and leaking, the strewn pizza, the dribbling bottles. You’re a fucking pig, Chippy, she said.
Oink, he said.
She pulled him upright, pushed him into the bathroom, turned on the hot shower, shoved him into it even though he was still in his underwear. He stood under the hot water, periodically lapping at it, until it went cold, and, when he came into his bedroom, his sister had packed a suitcase and was sweeping everything on his coffee table into a trash bag with a broom. Grab a coat, she said. Car’s downstairs. The driver’s waiting.
But, he said, I have things to attend. He was sought after. There was a gallery opening, there was a gala for the art museum, he was hosting a table.
They’ll survive without you, Elizabeth said dryly.
As the car moved off, he fell asleep immediately, and, when he woke, Elizabeth was poring over files on the seat beside him. In the window, fields spun by under threatening low clouds. The prodigal son’s awake, she said. I’m drying you out. The big house is closed but Slim and Bear are going to let you use the caretaker’s cottage until you pull your shit together.
But they fired me, he said.
Jesus, Chippy, she said. You would be happier doing literally anything else. That’s the worst part. Not that they fired you, that they let you take the job at all. You were never meant for this life.
He turned his face toward the window so that she wouldn’t see his expression and when he got control over himself again, he said, So you think I’m an idiot, too.
She hesitated for so long that he despaired, oh, he hated himself so much, and when she at last spoke she said, No. You’re not an idiot, but I think you were born lucky. And sometimes luck is a bad thing because you never had to find out what it was you were good at or loved to do. And now you’re going to have a lot of time alone to ask yourself these questions. And this is a different kind of luck, which you can’t see right now, but you will someday.
It was dusk when they arrived, and twenty degrees colder than it had been in Boston. The great house was sleeping, windows shut-eyed. They fetched the key from the mudroom, and, through the glass of the French doors, saw the furniture tucked into its white sheets, the chandelier suspended ghostly above, the ancestors watching dour and patient from the shadows along the walls.
Out over the grass to the caretaker’s cottage tucked against the woods. It hadn’t been inhabited for twenty years, since Slim began hiring a housekeeper and a landscaping crew from the village for the summer and a contractor to check on the house once or twice a week in the winter, but, as with everything in Slim’s empire, it was scrupulously neat. The walls were knotty pine, the floors yellow linoleum, a wood-burning stove took up most of the room in the living space, green cakes of mouse poison sat in every cabinet and corner. There was a metal bed with a mattress still in its great plastic cover. Elizabeth bounced on it and the bedsprings screamed. I had the mattress delivered this afternoon, she said. She flicked the light switches and ran the water and nodded with satisfaction to see that someone had come by to turn it all on.
He watched his sister unpack the groceries she had thought to pick up before coming to get him, mostly vegetables, rice, canned tuna and meat, then she opened a duffel and took from it a towel and sheets she’d packed in his condo. His sister was a wonder, he thought, as he made the fire, and he felt resentful toward her for her thoughtfulness, her organization.
They made a salad together but neither ate much. I see you’ve got me in low-rent fat camp, he said, slapping his belly so it jiggled. She didn’t laugh. Low-rent rehab, more like it, she countered. Slim said you can go ahead and take whatever you need from the great house. The keys to the jeep are on the hook in the mudroom, if you want to go for groceries or whatever. Then the thing in her that was brittle and angry softened, and tears filled her eyes, and she squeezed his hand. I’m leaving tonight, she said, I have a breakfast meeting. Slim and Bear’s phone service is off but there’s a phone down in the village at the general store. You be sure to call me at six every Friday at work, yes? So I know you’re alive.
How long will I be in exile? he said, thinking of Slim and Bear’s liquor cabinet, though it seemed countries away in that old house full of family ghosts.
That’s up to you, Elizabeth said, and slapped him lightly on the cheek, then kissed him. We’re planning a family Thanksgiving here, maybe you’ll be good by then.
When Elizabeth’s car had pulled away and silence poured in to fill where the noise and the light had been, he locked the door against the night. He looked in all the closets and pulled out an old green military blanket that had been nibbled at the corners by mice. There were also two neatly folded sets of overalls, clean but paint-spattered, which, though they had sat unused for two decades, still smelled like detergent and pipe tobacco and another man’s body. He pulled his new mattress near the woodstove, and lay under the blanket, listening to the forest noises which had become so loud he doubted he would be able to sleep at all.
When he woke, the fire was out. In the windows a gray dawn moved over the lawn in curls of fog. His head ached, and he felt a terrible darkness in him when he understood that it was aching because it had been a very long time since he had met the dawn sober. He drank three jars of water, pissed out the door, then lay back down on the mattress again and slept until midday.
He felt cleaner when he awoke. He put on one of the pairs of overalls he’d found, and his sneakers, and went for a walk where there used to be a trail through the wood. He got lost, and, hours later, ended up down at the beaver pond, the wind a frigid whip snapping off the water. His hands shook and he told himself it was from cold. When he climbed back up to the cottage, he found an axe in the shed, and a whetstone, and tried to sharpen the head, then spent a while teaching himself how to chop wood.
Back out into the twilight, sore, with the flashlight, to try to find the far pond, the much larger one where distant generations of his family had learned to sail as children in little wooden boats. During his childhood months at the estate, when he and Elizabeth had roasted marshmallows out there on summer nights, the fireflies flickering doubled against the water and the moon leering down enormous, Bear had come out to visit them and tell stories of the family. Their favorite was the one about Bear’s uncle, a rakish handsome boy who had taken a village girl out on a rowboat one night, but the girl ended up mysteriously drowned. The uncle had died young. Heartbroken, they all said, his life ruined by the inquest and unfair rumors of murder. The lovers haunt the pond even now, Bear said solemnly, then stood with the lantern and left the children to put out the fire and camp in the boathouse alone. Later, when Elizabeth was sleeping in her hammock in the boathouse, Chip stayed awake, blinking up at the rafters, hearing a low sighing all the way around the building and thinking of the drowned girl with weeds in her hair, her flesh purple and swollen with water. He turned the flashlight on in pulses to make sure his sister was still in her hammock beside him, and could fall asleep only with her face uplit.
It was almost night when Chip found this larger pond, windless and still under the half-moon, though the mountain in the distance was still aflame with last light. The boathouse seemed sturdy, though its windows were broken. Inside, he found evidence of teen-age parties, beer cans heaped in a corner, graffiti everywhere, a spent condom like a crushed grub on the floor. But the boats were still neatly stacked, the sails furled and hanging from the rafters to keep the mice out, even the oars for the most part whole on their racks.
He went out to the end of the splintered dock and looked back at the Victorian building, its filigreed woodwork shedding paint, and he understood as he looked that restoring it would be his first project. He had learned those summers in college, had found he had a knack for this kind of work. He would earn his keep. On the way back through the woods, he dreamed of chipping off the paint by hand, reglazing the windows. He went to bed so early that he felt silly, and was at the hardware store in the village as soon as it opened, putting the caulk and glass, the scrapers and primers and paint and brushes, a new door lock, on Slim and Bear’s account.
Then he worked. He had never in his life used his body so constantly. He was sunburned, callused by the end of the first week, so sore that moving out of his bed in the morning brought tears to his eyes. He had dragged an old horsehair sofa out of the barn where all the family furniture was left when it lost a leg or was replaced by the whims of the new generation, and risked the great house at midday to fill his arms with books from the library, and spent the evenings after his meal near the woodstove, reading. The last great reader of the family was Bear’s grandmother, and there were thousands of crumbly novels from the turn of the twentieth century. They, like the physical work of the boathouse, felt impossible at first and then, through steadiness and Chip’s having nothing else to do, they became easier, then natural to him.
After this first week, Chip remembered the rifles Bear had bought when, for a time in the eighties, he thought he would be a big-game hunter, before he understood that he had no relish for killing. He found them on the walls in Bear’s study, the shells in a desk drawer, and one afternoon, when his hands were too blistered and painful to go back to work after lunch, he lined a fence with a row of cans and practiced shooting. This, too, became a part of his silent days, the crack of the rifle before dinner, the cans pinging off into the weeds, the slow mastery.
When he called his sister the second Friday of his exile, he spoke about how the boathouse was coming along, but neglected to mention the guns, knowing she would not approve. He told her he had deep-cleaned the interior, fixed the windows, it could be a little chapel when the light hit it, and was now scraping the loose ancient paint from the exterior. He heard the smile in her voice when she said, That’s great, Chippy. It’s so great that you have a project. It took all the strength he had to not smash the telephone down, she was so patronizing, she was treating him like a child. He breathed for a little while, his eyes shut against the ugly light of the general store. Yes, he said at last. Isn’t it cute, my little project, and she didn’t hear the acid in his voice, or perhaps she didn’t suspect that he had any acid in him, as he never had shown any before; he had been a lonely child, and then the alcohol must have dulled it out of him.
One afternoon on the third week of his solitude, he was on a ladder scraping the trim near the boathouse’s peak when he saw movement in the corner of his eye, and turned his head in time to see a little dog at the far end leaping into the pond after a stick. The dog swam back to shore and shook itself, and the tinkle of its collar bounced across the surface of the water and toward Chip. He descended the ladder and wiped his hands on a rag. He had seen so few people these past few weeks, only the cashier at the general store in the village and the clerk at the gas station, and they had traded only a handful of words. His heart was pounding.
He went along the path to meet the trespasser, and the little dog was there first. It was a collie, but a tiny one, a silly little creature that smiled and wagged and shoved its sharp nose into his crotch. Chip was on his knee petting the dog when its owner came around the bend and stopped in the path. Hey, she said warily.
Hey, he said, looking upward at her, and then something in his chest gave a squeeze because he knew this face, the lush lips and Roman nose, the long black curls now daubed at the temples with gray. She had small shoulders, great round hips and thighs, and was looking at him curiously, frowning. He had the vertiginous feeling that she was the authority here, she belonged; that, although this was his family land, he was the interloper.
And he searched wildly in his mind, until there returned to him a short skirt, red sequins, flags on fingernails, a musty perfume that had stirred him in Boston every time a woman walked by and trailed it behind her. Yes. What was her name? Pearl Spang. He remembered now because it was what Elizabeth always called a waitress who was too chummy, a drunk girl peeing on the street, Republican women, vulgar people in general. She had become a family story, had passed into a sobriquet. Pearl Spang.
The woman gave a grunt and clicked her tongue and the dog slunk back to her. Boathouse coming along good, she said.
He stood, and this did not help his sense of being wrong-footed, because Pearl Spang was a head taller than he. Thank you, he said.
I been admiring your work when we take walks up here. My dog and me.
Oh, he said. The moment to say that this was private property and she should not be here at all vanished over the horizon.
We hike up on the back of the mountain, on the class-six roads, she said. Through the town forest, I live near it. Anyways. After all these years, it’s strange to have someone up at this place at this time of year. Usually summer folk, those rich old people that own the place, sometimes they come up Thanksgiving, Christmas. All a sudden, they had someone living here, a surprise. We were all pretty curious about what’s going on with you and everything. They hire you? You’re here as a caretaker? That’s my theory. They’re getting old and need someone to keep a steady eye on the place.
Yep, he said, and he flushed with the lie, and, to cover it, he said, You want to take a look inside the boathouse?
Sure, she said, and he led the way around the side of the pond, and opened the door for her. She stepped in, whistling. So pretty, she said. Like a church or something. All that wavy light off the pond. I only knew it from when we snuck in to party as kids and it was kind of freaky and shadowy. Gross old mattress that saw lots of cherries popped on it. Every so often, they toss it out, clean the place up, and the kids’d wait until the old people took off in the fall to come back up and make it theirs again. You fix up the loft? she said, and didn’t wait for him, but went up the stairs and said from above, Man, that’s pretty.
I were you? she said, coming back down. I’d put hammocks back up there. Nice place to sleep in the summer. They used to do that back in the olden days. How long you here for?
As long as I can stand it, he said, and she laughed.
Well, she said. There’s no need for you to be a hermit. We’re a little standoffish, it’s true, that old Yankee wariness you hear about, but you’ll find us nice enough when you get to know us. Come down to the Italian restaurant in town, it’s my place, I’ll buy you a beer. My name’s Pearl.
I’m Chip, he said, and she smiled, her face dimpled and sunny and suddenly quite lovely. There was a shiver in him to know now, definitively, that she, who had taken up so much of his imagination since that awful Independence Day more than fifteen years ago, hadn’t recognized him. But of course she hadn’t; he’d been a kid then.
I better get back to work, he said, and she said, Okeydoke, and began to move off, then turned around and said, I mean it, Chip. Don’t be a stranger.
I won’t, he said. When she was gone with the dog dancing around her, he was too lighthearted to go up the ladder again. Instead, he stripped and dove into the pond, which was still somewhat warm from the summer, and when he got out he sang to himself and worked happily until twilight and went back through the woods feeling quick and alive.
The beer Pearl had promised him tempted him, danced before him, probably because he was here to learn how to live without drinking. He wondered how old she was. Unsmiling, her face could have been that of a woman of fifty or so, but, when she smiled, she seemed in her thirties. He’d never met anybody with so much presence. She’d almost frightened him, she was so large and full of life. But perhaps it was situational, the place magnifying something in her. He thought of how Pearl would seem in the city, how he would walk by her on the streets without seeing her; he thought of her on Uncle Charley’s sailboat in the harbor and laughed at the absurdity of it, how ungainly and uncomfortable she would be there.
On the third day after he’d seen Pearl down at the far pond, he finished his work early, took a shower using up all the hot water, put on a clean sweatsuit and jogged over to the great house, up the stairs, and into Bear’s closet. His grandfather had plenty of beautiful shirts and sweaters and slacks hanging neatly in plastic bags. In his grandparents’ bathroom, he used Bear’s straight razor, then his aftershave and hair pomade, and stood back to look at himself. He did not look like the Chip from the last years in the city, not at all. He was tanned, and the physical work from dawn to dusk had made his plumpness disappear; now, for the first time in forever, he had cheekbones. Maybe he wasn’t actually handsome yet, he was losing hair at the temples and he looked hungry, but he looked better than he’d looked since those summers as a young man on Martha’s Vineyard. He took Bear’s oiled jacket and tried on his moccasins, but they were far too large for him. In any event, he liked the way the work boots he’d picked up cheaply at the hardware store contrasted with the fine clothes he’d taken from his grandfather, the way they made him swagger a little, like the kind of man who drove a pickup and listened to country music.
As the jeep curled down the mountain and into the village, his hands began to tremble. He looked for the pizza place he remembered from his childhood, but the slapdash red-checkered sign was gone and he drove past the building where it had once been. When he drove by again, he saw his error; a nice sit-down Italian restaurant had supplanted the pizza place. There was a long and glossy bar inside, and a hostess who looked behind him to see if he was with anyone before she showed him to a little table in the shadows. The place was full, though it was a Thursday night, perhaps because it was the only real restaurant in town.
He looked around but could see Pearl nowhere, and hesitated for a long moment when the server asked if he wanted a drink. At last he said, Just sparkling water, then ordered far too much food to eat at a single sitting, and, when he was left alone, he surreptitiously watched his fellow diners, the happy families, the sullen families, the old couples who ate in resigned silence, looking past each other’s heads.
His food came all at once: housemade cavatelli, fresh calamari, lemony and crisp asparagus with flakes of Parmesan. A surprise in the middle of New Hampshire. It had been so long since he had eaten with gusto. His body hummed with pleasure. He had eaten more than half the pasta when the chair across the table was pulled out and Pearl sat in it. She wore her hair pulled back tightly and a chef’s coat buttoned to the neck.
He put his fork down, and chewed, and swallowed. You’re the chef? he said.
Not normally, she said, and explained that her head cook was out with the flu and the sous was off on his honeymoon, and she’d been around long enough to be able to step in. We take care of each other here, she said. You like it?
You’re an incredible cook, he said.
You’re just hungry, she said. But I’m glad you like it. She smiled, and the wrinkles by her eyes deepened. And I’m glad you took my hint.
Chip felt himself go hot, and drank his seltzer down, and she took a piece of calamari from his plate and popped it in her mouth. No, you’re right, that is good, she said, through the mouthful of food and laughed. Then she leaned forward and said, So. Just so you know. I don’t play games.
O.K., he said.
I think you and me want the same thing, she said.
Oh. Yes, he said quickly, eyes down.
So what’s going to happen is you slow down on this food, yes? Take your time. We got another hour of service. I’ll send out a tiramisu when you’re done eating all this. And when all the staff has gone home, you follow me to my house, yes?
Yes, he said.
Good, she said. So tip like a gentleman. Then she stood and the legs of her chair scraped unbearably on the floor, and she was gone back to the kitchen, and he was alone with the blood pulsing in his ears.
He kept his eyes down because he was sure that the other customers were staring at him, and that they could read his desire on his face. He scolded himself: she was so much older than he was, she had a huge butt, she was not beautiful, not at all, she was blunt, his sister used her name as a slur, what in the world did he think he was doing. He thought of what his college buddies would say if they saw her; he hated himself for a moment. But the food he could no longer eat was taken away and brought back in lovely Kraft boxes, and a slice of tiramisu dusted with cocoa was set before him, and with the first taste he knew it was no use, that nothing he would tell himself could stop what he wanted to happen from happening.
The bartender and waitresses cleaned and wiped and washed, the last guests wound scarves around their necks and left. He paid his bill, and helped Pearl set the chairs atop the tables, then followed her through the shining kitchen and out the back door into the night. She got into her battered sedan and he followed her through the forest in his jeep, the trees looming up like ghosts, passing back into the darkness. They came to a stop in her driveway, which he felt vaguely was somewhere near the other end of the town forest. Her place was a tiny antique brick house, very neat. He could just about see the eighteenth-century farming family that had built it frowning out the windows at him.
She opened the door and the little dog burst out of it and peed in a great rush, then pushed its little body back into the house in front of Chip. He expected a riot of colors, overstuffed furniture, tchotchkes everywhere, but Pearl’s house was Shaker in its simplicity. Everything was smooth and fine and considered: the long simple cherry table, the walls of books, the smell of camomile and other herbs. It was warm. The little collie curled around his legs in joy, and a black cat slid across the walls and sat, flicking its tail, at the pets’ food dishes, which Pearl filled before she even took her coat off.
I stink like a fryer. I’ve got to wash up, Pearl said. Make yourself at home. She went into the single bedroom, and he sat, petting the dog. He took off his work boots awkwardly and put them under the bench at the mudroom door. There was a hole in his sock that he hid between his toes.
When Pearl came out of the bathroom, she didn’t bother with a robe or even a towel. All her flesh shone wet and pink with heat, and there was heat in her mouth when she bent over him, heat in the rosemary-scented water falling in drops from her hair. Stand up, she said, and unbuttoned his shirt, undid his belt, his pants. She was so much larger than he was. She led him to the bedroom. He could not remember the last time he had touched a woman without being drunk. This unmediated feeling was almost too intense to bear. His skin felt tender against hers, her weight pressing down upon him good, her mouth tasting of baking soda. She needed no preliminaries, or she had readied herself in the shower, and she took his cock in her hand, and put it inside her, and held his chest down with one hand as she moved above him.
He had to concentrate very hard to hold off, he had to count, and, at last, as soon as she shouted, he let himself go. She cursed under her breath, and used a handful of tissues to wipe herself, then rolled onto her side of the bed. In three breaths she was asleep. The cat came into the room and leapt onto the windowsill and stared at Chip with glowing green eyes. He could make out in the dark the creases that ran from Pearl’s nose to her chin, the shock of white in the black hair of her temples. He didn’t stir, afraid of breaking the slow, wonderful feeling in him, until his stillness passed into sleep.
When he woke, the sun was in the windows and Pearl had made him coffee, bacon, eggs, a fried tomato. She was in reading glasses steamed up by her coffee at the table.
There he is, she said, putting down her magazine. Bet you’re late for work.
Long as the work gets done, I’m good, he said. He felt too shy to look her full in the face. We can, like, go for a walk or something if you want. He thought of the two of them walking in the woods, the little collie springing about, the red and golden leaves, how there would be nobody there to see them and he wouldn’t have to hide his face.
Ah, Pearl said. He cut into his tomato, juice spurting. He ate, and she watched him, her face amused, and at last she said, So I’m too old to be beating around any bushes. I’m just going to say it straight up. I’m not looking for a boyfriend or whatever you’re thinking this is. You have one job, and you did it, so I think we’re good to go. No hanging out. So you go on and eat your breakfast, then you take off. I like my alone time.
She looked like a librarian in her glasses, carefully explaining some cataloguing system to him.
Oh, he said, and put his fork down. He felt ridiculous, sorely wounded. He stood quickly and put on his work boots and went across the crisp cold grass to his car. Don’t be like that, Pearl called from the doorway, but he slammed his door and pulled out too fast onto the dirt road. The farther he drove from Pearl, the darker his hurt shaded itself, until he was in a black and boiling place, because he was so ashamed of himself, of his desire, because she wasn’t pretty, she wasn’t young or rich or powerful or educated or smart or accomplished or from an old family, she was just some fat-assed ugly-faced middle-aged spinster from a hick town, she was a fucking nothing, she was embarrassing, and here she was, rejecting him, who was young and educated and his family was his family and he deserved someone better. God, he hated himself for ever having wanted her.
He stopped at the general store. He would never tell his sister what had happened, she would only feel more pity for him, but he felt like a hurtling train and her voice would set him back on track. Her secretary said she was in a meeting, though, and couldn’t talk and so he drove to the great empty silence of the estate alone, back to his wordless, bodily exile.
All morning he scraped at the boathouse angrily, gouging the softer wood deeper than he should have, working through a sharp and stinging rain that afternoon, through the windy cold front that set in the next week. And, when there was nothing left to scrape, he primed the whole building in one long day, and painted over the course of the daylight hours for the next two, and the boathouse was finally returned to its Victorian elegance, green and gold and gazing in astonishment at its own reflection in the early-morning pond. But Chip could no longer enjoy the place, because Pearl had been inside it with him. He often thought of what he would do if she and the collie came around the pond again, and he had an image of himself kicking the collie right in its apricot mane, in its pink nose, but he knew that he could never do that, he couldn’t kick a dog, no matter how much he wanted to kick its owner. His only catharsis was the controlled kick of the rifle, how accurate he was getting from quite a distance away.
When there was nothing more to do on the boathouse, he retreated to the caretaker’s cottage, knelt on the linoleum, and ripped it up with his hands, getting cuts all over, finding good hand-hewn pine boards underneath, and thus uncovering his next project. He sat back on his haunches, thinking. He would fix up the caretaker’s cottage room by room. He knocked at the wall between the kitchen and living space and saw that it could be opened up to one large room, with the bedroom and bathroom off to the side. He smashed the walls and the cabinets, removed the battered old appliances, and for a few days cooked his noodles and eggs on a plug-in stovetop. On the day he rented a sander, and was learning how to use it, he felt a presence in the room with him and looked up to find Pearl standing there, smiling at him with a picnic basket in her hand.
What are you doing here, he said. His voice felt rough in his throat, it was so little used these days.
Making amends, she said. Pretty sure I hurt your feelings.
He had to turn away to keep the sting in his eyes from embarrassing him, and, when he turned back, he said, I thought you wanted me to leave you alone.
Jesus, she said. I just said that I don’t want a boyfriend. I don’t think you want me to be your girlfriend, either. It’s all good.
With this, the anger faded out of him, because it was true, he didn’t want her to be his girlfriend. Now, on the other side of his long, silent rage, he felt foolish.
They sat together on the old horsehair couch. Pearl unpacked mozzarella and mortadella sandwiches on ciabatta with aioli, lemonade, homemade pickles, strawberry-rhubarb tarts. She ate like a hungry man, huge bites she chewed with her beautiful mouth open so that he could see the churn of food inside. He watched, revolted, deeply attracted. They ate everything, even the crumbs, and then Pearl put her hand on Chip’s leg.
How’s about we agree that whatever this is is just fun? You scratch my itch, I scratch yours. Expect nothing. Keep it quiet, keep it light.
Fine, he said. Her nails were neat, painted pink, her hand heavy. He wanted to hurt her a little. Like I’m your boy toy, he said.
Yeah, she said. Paid in food. And she leaned over and kissed him, and he resisted for a moment, but, because her hair smelled like rosemary, and because she was the only person in hundreds of miles who gave the smallest of fucks about him, he kissed her back.
Through early November, they fell into a rhythm; Chip would work all day and drive down to the village at midnight and wait in the back lot for Pearl to come out of the restaurant. Some nights she would bring a box of food to the driver’s window and hand it in to him with a tired smile, and this meant that he should go home, eat the food, go to bed; some nights, she nodded in the jeep’s direction as she climbed into her car, and he followed her back up to the house, where she made him an omelette or pasta and they had sex and he spent the night warm beside her radiant heat, the slow near-snores of her breaths. They barely spoke at the breakfasts she made for him, but once in a while she would answer his shy questions. Yeah, she went to college but only a semester and then she dropped out to take care of her dad when he was dying. Yeah, her family was huge, three sisters and seven brothers, and she was the baby, they were all so protective. Once in high school, even, she said, they put a boy who’d been a little fresh into the hospital, got too rough and cracked open his head. She laughed at Chip’s face. Don’t worry, she said, you don’t seem the offending sort. No, I’m a good guy, Pearl, he said. Yeah, that’s what they all say, she said, raising an eyebrow, but she let him stay in the neat, lovely house when she went off to work that day, as long as he locked up. Alone, he felt quiet inside, happy, with the dog who’d taken to curling around Chip’s feet at the table, the purring cat, the clean white kettle that sang in contralto instead of shrieking, the light softened by the trees all around the brick house, shining through the windows in flitting winglike movements.
He marvelled at this place, which, although tiny, somehow held a sort of largeness he’d never experienced before; there was an order, an attention to the exact right thing that spoke to him. It was not luxury the way he was used to it; it was better, it was comfortable.
Over these weeks, Pearl, too, had changed. Chip no longer found her old or ugly, and the qualities that had repelled him now appealed: the heft of her ass and thighs, the frankness of her hungers, the baby talk she reserved for the dog when she came home.
During the hours he worked on the cottage, he fantasized about getting a dog of his own, some kind of sad-faced rangy hound that would accompany him all day and sleep in his bed on those nights he didn’t spend with Pearl. But then he thought of moving into Pearl’s house one day, and how the imposition of both man and dog upon the careful clean place would be too much, and the spectre of his hound dog would keep her from ever opening the place to him, and then he would regretfully return the imaginary dog to the imaginary pound from which he’d adopted it.
He spoke to Elizabeth the Friday before Thanksgiving, and, just as he was about to ask what he should do to ready the house for the family, what food he should buy for the meals, she said regretfully that there had been a change of plans, their mother would be with Rich’s grown kids in North Carolina, Slim and Bear wanted to stay in the Arizona heat, Charley and Diana would be spending the holiday with Diana’s sister, and she, Elizabeth, could use a day to catch up on her sleep. But she could come out to the estate and spend the day with him, if he wanted?
He wanted. He wanted them all here, seeing him anew, not as Chippy but as this new person he was slowly becoming. He thought of the boathouse shining unadmired on the large pond, the way he was working fourteen hours a day to make the cabin a sleek, whitewashed little jewel, how he had planned the whole next week to the minute so that he could be finished with the cottage and able to show his family how good he was at this kind of work. How carpentry soothed him, how he’d found in the neat angles and precise measurements something of a redemption. He swallowed. Don’t worry, he told his sister. It’s just another day.
And she, hearing the disappointment in his voice, said gently that Christmas was only a few weeks away, and this year it was a definite go up at the estate, Elizabeth would make it happen, even if she had to lasso every member of the family and drag them out there herself.
He hung up the phone and stood looking at his work boots until the clerk cleared her throat three times, and he bought a bag full of chips and soda he didn’t actually want, and took the afternoon off to go for a hike in the bare chilly woods, because finishing the cottage within the next week no longer mattered so much.
He was still feeling a little flattened at midnight when he drove down the mountain to wait for Pearl outside the restaurant. Though she came over with a box of food, she saw his face and sighed and said, Well, come along then, and he followed her taillights through the darkness to her house. Instead of initiating sex after her shower, she lay down on her bed, and turned on her side, and said, All right, tell me what got you down. She said it so coolly, her voice gave him pause.
And though he was tempted to tell her about his family not coming for Thanksgiving, this would reveal who he was to her, and he wasn’t ready to do that yet, to change the balance of power. Someday, perhaps. There were times when, as he worked, he imagined how it would be when she had fully let him in and he told her about his family, and he savored the thought of her face at that moment when she understood that he was more than just a caretaker. She would be startled first, then there’d slide in something like respect for him, a new interest in who he was as a person.
Instead, he said only that Thanksgiving always got him down, since he had no family to celebrate it with.
All the warmth drained out of her face. Are you fishing? she said. Jesus. No, Chip. I cannot invite you to my family’s Thanksgiving.
No, Pearl, I— he began, but she went on grimly, saying that she thought she’d made her position clear. They only fucked, that’s it. She could never introduce him to her family, just imagine, Jesus, she would never hear the end of it, her brothers would call her a cradle robber, he’d spend all day being mercilessly made fun of. For fuck’s sake, Chip. They were not together like that, she thought he knew it.
Yes, he said. I mean, of course. I wasn’t fishing, honest.
Listen, she said. I’m too tired to have this conversation. Let’s sleep and talk in the morning.
O.K., he said, and lay there stiffly as she slept, feeling somehow cheated, watching the cat perambulate in the shadowy room and finally come to rest between their bodies, purring, flexing its paws against Chip’s side and piercing him with delicious tiny prickings of its nails.
In the morning, Pearl awoke him with nothing more than oatmeal, although she’d prepared it with butter and brown sugar, and looked at him unsmilingly over her coffee. So, she said. I think we should probably cool this off a little. Just for a week or so. I want you to remember what we’re doing here.
You don’t have to do that, he said. I remember.
Yes, Chip, yes, I do, she said. Don’t come to the restaurant until next Saturday. You hear?
I hear, he said. He rose and put his boots on and as he drove home, his loneliness swamped him.
It was a long week. He felt strange to himself. He decided to fill his free hours by making a built-in bookshelf. There was solace in the steady, careful work. On Thanksgiving, when he went outside for a walk, there was heavy woodsmoke on the air and it seemed to fill his chest, and he found he could hardly breathe. He got in the jeep without letting himself think and drove past Pearl’s house, noting that her car was still in the drive. He parked on the class-six road leading into the town forest, where he could stay hidden, and watched her house. The jeep ticked itself cool, and crows shouted in the bare branches above. The cold seeped in. When she at last came out with a tower of pie boxes in her arms, and drove off, he trailed her from such a distance that only once in a while did he catch a maroon flash of her car.
Like this they went through the village, over the river, onto the highway. He let a few cars in ahead of him and slowed down when she got off at an exit and followed her two cars back into the old mill town where her family had arrived generations ago, when Italians were not quite white. She drove into a neighborhood that sat between the highway and the river, and parked before a blue ranch with an enormous yard that petered out beyond a pergola and finished at the riverbank. He circled the neighborhood, and then parked farther up the block to watch. Soon other cars pulled up, surrounding Chip on both sides, so many people pouring into the little house that he became a little afraid there would be no more room and they’d start bursting out of it.
The afternoon fell forward, the shadows spread, people arrived, people left, and suddenly out of the front door of the blue house the children were released in a burst, running in their dresses and suits, some immediately falling and turning their knees green. Someone found a ball, someone found a Frisbee. A set of little girls, all as sturdy and curly-haired as Pearl, stood in the middle of the street behind a larger girl with her back turned, and they crept forward together, paused together, and suddenly sprinted, screaming, as the large girl turned and ran after them and easily caught them one by one.
Watching these happy cousins made Chip smile, but the day had darkened so swiftly into twilight that now the windshield was reflecting his face, and to see his smile on his vague and floating face under his sparse curls, against the vividness and motion of the little girls in their bright dresses, sickened him. He made a grimace and the Chip in the windshield grimaced back. He drove off, and ate the holiday plate at the diner on the way back, where in each booth sat a quiet old man eating alone, reading the paper and flirting a little with the waitress when she came by and in the windows the cold night rolled down over New Hampshire.
As he had watched the blue house, thinking of the warmth and love inside, Chip had decided to let Pearl’s deadline go by without his talking to her, to wait an entire week more, and force his absence to make her wonder about him. If Slim taught him anything, it was how to wield silence as a weapon.
Over the week, he finished the cottage. He spent an hour sitting, looking at the place: the exposed beams and clean walls and shining floors, the subway tile and the marble, the windows filled with the slender white bodies of birches. It was a place, he saw now, that he had molded to the simple but complete taste of Pearl.
And then he dreamed of bringing her up there, making a meal with wine and candles, showing her without words what he felt for her. In his mind, he saw her apologizing to him, over and over, kissing him, telling him that she’d made an awful mistake, that she wanted him around. That maybe he should move in with her. Maybe through her he could meet more people, she knew everyone, and he could get work with a contractor, start making real money. And, when he lived with her, he could slowly work on her, buying her cashmere sweaters, pearls, modelling manners until she’d accidentally acquired some from him; he’d treat her to a makeover day at a salon to fix the gray hair, introduce her to his friends in the city, eventually even make her presentable for Slim.
On Saturday, a full week after the end of Pearl’s imposed exile, he made himself ready. His hands were trembling so severely that he put on too much of the aftershave he’d stolen from Bear, and it was so strong that he had to put down his window to let some of the cold wind blow it off him on his ride to the restaurant. As he waited, it began to snow, a superfine blowing powder that moved restlessly in the air without settling. He had come far too early, and had to blow his breath into his hands over and over to keep them from freezing, sharpening his anticipation by imagining how nice it would be inside the restaurant, how good the fresh pasta would taste, how lovely Pearl would look with her face flushed with the heat of the kitchen. He felt he hadn’t lived, hadn’t even breathed, since he’d seen her. At last, the servers slowly filtered out, then the bartender, the barback, the cooks. When Pearl came out, she was laughing, her face so beautiful in the dim light, and she was calling to someone behind her. He was about her age, a stocky man with a spot of shining scalp in a thick black head of hair. She turned and locked the door, still talking to the man, and they stood there under the light, under the swirls of snow, until Pearl moved toward her car, and the man moved with her. He got in with her. She started up her car, the headlights overbright on the street, and pulled out. She had not once looked toward the shadows beyond the dumpster, where Chip always sat waiting for her.
He counted a slow thousand to himself, then drove slowly up to Pearl’s house. As he neared her place, he turned off his headlights and engine, and coasted to the class-six road at the end of the town forest. As he glided silently by, he saw the windows brilliant with light, the dog in the yard sprinting a zigzag through what fine snow had fallen on the grass. And then, from where he’d parked, he could make out very little. He got out of the car, closing his door quietly, and crept through the woods toward the brick house. Pearl had let the dog in, and the sweet little thing wasn’t in the yard to leap at Chip and dance in joy, which filled him with grief, because he had missed the dog, too, its happy unconditional love. Chip came up to the mudroom door, but couldn’t see into the kitchen and living space, so he came around the side of the house to the window, and stood back and to the side for fear that Pearl would notice him.
He needn’t have worried; Pearl and the stranger were on the couch, their knees close, their faces nearly touching, talking, laughing, drinking great bulbs of red wine, each fixated on the other. The dog was resting on the man’s feet, the little traitor. The cat lay on the back of the couch, eyes closed.
Surely, the man was one of Pearl’s brothers, Chip told himself, because he had never seen Pearl speak so animatedly, so quickly, so happily. With him, Pearl was guarded, quiet, never a fan of extraneous conversation. But Pearl put down her glass, and touched the man’s face, and leaned forward and kissed him slowly. The man put his meaty hand at the back of Pearl’s neck. Chip could not look. He bent over in pain.
And then he ran, crouched over, back to his car, slipping on the slick mud of the road, and sat in the jeep, shaking, sick. Down the mountain again, far too fast. He longed to call his sister, but the general store was closed as he drove by. Back to the estate, heaped huge and black and scornful against the starless sky. Along the drive to his caretaker’s cottage where he’d left the pretty new chandelier alight, in case Pearl could have been persuaded to come to his place. It shone, gorgeously, onto the white yard and into the forest.
And in the house’s warmth he could feel no comfort at all, not in the quiche he had made so carefully and chilled in the fridge, thinking he could feed her for once, not in the shower that he stood under until the hot water was gone, not in the bed with the good Belgian linen sheets and coverlet he’d ordered from one of Slim’s catalogues, not in the night, which he passed sleepless and shaking with rage.
He rose before dawn, and paced in the cottage until it felt too tight all around him, the air too stale to breathe. And then he was back in the car, on the highway, driving to nowhere in particular, just driving. He dipped down into Massachusetts, but the state depressed him with its gloomy skies and dead-looking trees and the sad snow-battered houses along the side of the highway, and he could never drive back to Boston and show himself so thoroughly diminished, so he drove for hours along the gray back roads until he found another highway and came back into New Hampshire through Manchester. He found himself in the center of this city he didn’t know or really ever care to know; he got out of his jeep and sat in a cold, denuded park. There were still ducks on the pond, silly creatures that could have flown somewhere warmer and kinder, to some retention pond in Louisiana or Florida full of rich weeds and delicious fish and a sun that came out as promised every day. But, no, they chose to stay for the crusts of moldy bread humans threw them, lazy beasts, and snow would fall on their suffering heads and they would die one night when the temperature dipped below freezing, in a huddle with the other dummy ducks, their hearts stopping one after the other until they were dead.
He was shuddering with cold when he got it in his mind to leave; the nights fell soon and fast so deep in winter now, and the twilight was already upon him. He hadn’t eaten anything in a very long time.
Chip walked into the center of the town, and the scent of food drew him into an empty restaurant where he lingered over a plate of Thai noodles. Across the street, there was a jeweller’s with its window decorated for Christmas, a splendid winter-wonderland town scene with laughing pink-cheeked statuettes and diamonds everywhere, earrings glinting off the eaves of the houses like icicles, a glimmering star brooch atop a Christmas tree, diamonds embedded in the tinfoil pond where more pink-cheeked statuettes were skating. He threw down his napkin and some cash and was across the street at the door of the jewelry store as if drawn there beyond his will.
The jeweller was closing up, but brightened when Chip came in. He was a small and vigorous man, something like an elf, and, when Chip lingered over a vitrine full of rings, he swiftly modelled the larger rings on his own small pale hands, citrine to turquoise to ruby to emerald. But Chip was not such a fool, he would not buy Pearl a ring, he knew that would scare her off for good. He moved on to the bracelets. Some were far too delicate for Pearl’s large wrist bones, others too gaudy for her tastes, but at last he saw a gold band with three perfect sapphire chips set off center, as though they made an ellipsis. He smiled, thinking of the symbolism. At the smile the little jeweller leapt, and nestled the bracelet in a froth of cotton, in a pretty pink box, and tied it with a silken bow and took Chip’s credit card and charged him a full month of mortgage payments for his condo, without Chip’s ever having fully agreed to buy the bracelet.
Chip was uneasy, but, when the jeweller handed the box solemnly to him, he felt that the man was putting hope itself into his hands. The gray cloud that had descended upon him lifted, and everything gleamed and shone all around him, the street itself made beautiful with this new feeling. Outside, the light from a liquor store dazzled his eyes, and he watched as if from far outside himself as he entered and bought a handle of bourbon, and would not let himself think of his sister’s disappointment, or of his own disappointment, only of the spicy burn and the warmth inside his stomach. He did not wait until he was in his jeep to open the bottle, but stopped on a quiet street and held the box with the bracelet between his legs and drank a few great gulps, and his head was pleasantly muffled when he turned the engine on.
Chip drove singing loudly through the dark, drinking from time to time, far too fast, feeling the thrill of the gift that sat like a tiny person in the passenger seat beside him. He thought of waiting until Christmas to give the bracelet to Pearl, but Christmas was still two weeks off, and his family was coming the week before, and, with them around, he would not see Pearl, and, well, since he had the courage, he might as well give the gift to Pearl now, get back in her graces. He checked the time. She would still be at the restaurant, he realized, so he drove up to her house, and parked at the town forest, and walked down to her house with the bourbon in one hand and the present in the other. He knew she kept her spare key under a rock in the shade garden by the mudroom door, and he let himself in. The dog barked, at first scared, then seeing it was him came out to meet him. He let the dog do its business in the yard, then fed both animals, taking off his boots and stowing them under the mudroom bench, and keeping the lights off.
How strange the house was in the night, he thought, looking around. It smelled the same, of dried herbs and Pearl, it was warm as ever, but, without the woman in it, the house was just a house. He went into her bathroom and sniffed her shampoos and conditioners, then came out and lay down on Pearl’s bed. But, just as he was drifting off to sleep, he startled himself awake; she would be seriously displeased to come home and find him already in her bed. He drank deeply, considering. The bottle felt light and he looked at it, marvelling how it was already so empty. At last, with a laugh, he understood what he needed to do, and he went into her closet and shut the door on himself, pushing aside her shoes. He would wait until she had showered and was nearly asleep to come out; this was when she was at her kindest, gentlest, most malleable, and he would climb in bed with her, kiss her, and she’d smile in her sleep and curl close to him.
The closet smelled like Pearl’s skin and lotion and shoe leather. It was stuffy but nice. Through the crack he could see a slice of light on the bedroom wall as her headlights came closer, then her engine shut off and her footsteps neared, and the kitchen door opened.
She greeted the dog and now there was a flood of light that fell from the kitchen area into the bedroom, but Pearl was still talking; she was, it seemed, offering the dog wine. How strange. No, something was not quite right here, this wasn’t the voice she normally used with the dog, and at last he understood with a sick lurch that she wasn’t alone. A deep male voice answered. Yes, it said, it would love some wine.
Chip could barely hear a thing then. His whole body was shaking, and his grip on the bottle was so tight he could hardly let it go when the glass began to rattle against the door. He breathed into his hands, suddenly sick with terror. The man he had seen with her was far larger than Chip was, and Chip was drunk, horribly drunk, oh, my God, how had he got here, how did he think this was a good idea. He was about to be murdered by that enormous man. He listened to Pearl feeding the dog, pouring the wine, saying she needed a shower, he heard the shower starting, Pearl singing to herself as she showered, and the warm damp steam reached him even where he was in the depths of her closet.
When she came out, she was naked. He saw her rosy flesh as she stood in the doorway of her bedroom saying, Put that down and come here. The man gave a laugh. Now Chip had to hear the wet and dreadful sounds they were making, the slip and grunt of people not himself having sex. He craned his neck but could see nothing but a hairy shoulder. Pearl came, the man came. There were whispers. Then Pearl began to breathe as she always breathed with a little snoring hitch in her nose, and Chip counted to himself, slowly.
At a thousand, he opened the closet door silently and moved through the lightless bedroom, through the kitchen, to the mudroom where he had forgotten the pink box on the bench when he took off his boots, it had been there all along, shining, perfect, fully visible if Pearl had been able to see it. Small mercies. He gathered the box and the boots up in his hands and carefully opened the mudroom door and closed it and ran in his wet cold socks into the forest far enough so that he could not be heard; then he put on his boots and went shaking back to the jeep. There was a wetness at his crotch, growing cold. He had pissed himself. He clutched the box in his arms until he was calm enough to start up the car and drive with headlights off past Pearl’s house. It wasn’t until he was home that he understood at last that he had left the bottle of bourbon and probably a stink of piss in Pearl’s closet.
He sat at his kitchen table, petrified in fear. When morning came, and he knew the general store would be opening for the old men who went to get their coffees and cider doughnuts and newspapers, he showered hurriedly and dressed and went down the mountain, and stood calling Elizabeth’s home number over and over until his sister was roused out of her deep sleep and angrily answered.
When he heard her voice, Chip started crying. He turned his back on the clerk, on the store with its buzzing lights and groaning refrigerators, the headlines grim about the snowstorm on the horizon. He put his head in the crook of his elbow and whispered, Libby?
Chippy? she said. What the hell. What’s going on?
But he couldn’t tell her. To tell her would be to see the last of his sister’s good opinion vanish forever. So he struggled to stop sobbing, to breathe. By the time he controlled himself, his sister had controlled herself, too.
Whatever it is, it’s really bad, huh, his sister said, coolly.
Yes, he said.
O.K., she said. Here’s the plan. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Listen, can you just hunker down? Can you just make it to the end of the day? I’ve got a deal I absolutely have to finish this morning, it’s like years and years of setting up, it absolutely must be nailed down today, but as soon as I’m done I’ll have them drive me a hundred miles an hour out to you. Don’t worry, Chippy. I’ll be there, I promise. Whatever this is, I can take care of it. O.K.?
O.K., he said. He knew she could not.
Don’t do anything stupid, she said. Go, like, take a hot shower, and go for a walk or something, all right? And then take another hot shower. Take a hot shower every two hours. You’ll be fine.
Right, sure, he said, and hung up, desolate.
He bought an egg sandwich and a coffee and came slowly up the mountain, but, when he saw the estate on its hill, his cottage shining in the blue morning against the forest, he knew he needed the mass of his family behind him, otherwise he would be too small against what he felt was coming. He drove the jeep into Bear’s garage, and went through the huge gloomy rooms of the big house until he was in Bear’s office, where, in the smell of pipe tobacco and cedar and dust, he felt safer.
Then he sat with a book in Bear’s wing chair. The drapes were pulled, but through the gap he could see down the dirt road for a good mile. He tried to read but could only imagine Pearl’s morning, her quick waking, washing, letting the dog out, making coffee, making breakfast for the man asleep in her bed. He thought he could feel her shock in his body when she opened the closet door and saw the bottle, the crumpled nest of shoes. When the smell of piss rose to her. He stood in agitation and rifled through his grandfather’s desk drawers until he found the secret stash of Bear’s favorite Scotch, and he drank it slowly to make his hands stop shaking.
It was almost midday when he saw the first of the caravan of trucks and cars coming up the dirt road, and he steeled himself and moved to the other side of the house, to Slim’s blue-gray dressing room, where through her sheer curtains he could watch his cottage. The trucks pulled in and parked around it. Dark-haired men got out, stout and thin, a half-dozen or so, and conferred in a knot. These must be Pearl’s family, here to threaten him, and he felt a sinking sadness that he had never got to meet them, or else they would have known he was a good guy, a gentleman, that he would never have hurt her. One of them went up to the door and knocked and, with no answer, swung the door open and went inside. Then some of the younger men entered, and Chip’s great-great-grandmother’s books came flying out the door, their brittle leaves spilling, and the few clothes and shoes he had were dumped in a drift, and one of the older men went to the woodshed and came back with the axe, which he embedded in the door.
Then they left, and in Bear’s office Chip watched their taillights disappear, and he watched another two hours go by on Bear’s office clock until at last he returned to his cottage and saw the plates and cups smashed on his shining new floors, the horsehair couch spilling its guts, his pillow with a kitchen knife pinning it to his mattress. Barbarians. An endpaper ripped out of one of the old books was on the table, someone having scribbled in pencil, Stay off. It was so stupid, so redundant, as though the mess alone weren’t enough to warn Chip away.
He picked his things up off the snowy lawn and put them by the heater vents to dry, unwedged the axe from the door, put the pillow and its spilled feathers into the trash, swept up the mess. His head pounded from the Scotch, and he put his mouth under his faucet and drank the cold water deeply until he gasped.
Elizabeth was coming, he told himself. Maybe she was already on her way. She would help him close the house down, feed him, bring him home. But the hours still stretched on endlessly before him, and he went to the utility closet and reached around the water heater, and grabbed Bear’s gun just to feel safe in the cottage again. He fashioned a sling out of a piece of old rope and strung the rifle on his back.
Even so he couldn’t sit, he couldn’t do anything but pace. He hated the cottage suddenly for all the loneliness it had silently held these months, and so he went outside without a jacket or hat or gloves; he would walk fast enough, he reasoned, he would stay warm through walking, until Elizabeth could come. He headed down to the large pond, which had a lace of ice at its edges, and paced around in the boathouse, warm out of the wind; but this place, too, reminded him of Pearl, she had walked through it with her great confident steps, her dog had leapt into the pond after a stick, right over there, it was too much. He returned to the great house, and, under the angry gaze of painted generations, he stole Slim’s most excellent bourbon, the small-batch stuff impossible to find, and gulped until his eyes smarted. Ah, now he felt much better, much stronger.
And, as he was going out through the mudroom again, he remembered the little pink package on the passenger seat in the jeep; and he thought that since Elizabeth was going to take him away this very evening, he might as well walk through the woods to Pearl’s house, leave the present on the doorstep in apology. Perhaps when she wore it she would think of him. Perhaps she would look at the three sapphires and wonder how he was doing.
What a good decision that was, how lovely this forest was in the late gray light, the soft first falling snow of the storm in the windless tree limbs, how hushed and gentle everything had grown. There were no birds out, no sound at all but his footsteps on the path. A gleam of some late-day light that escaped the low clouds occasionally fell against the far mountains and made them dimly glow. Somewhere out in the woods even the bears were sleeping. He felt excellent, moving so fast, the bourbon having given him courage, the gun solid against his back, just in case; he was ready to leave, he was ready to begin something larger, better, newer, elsewhere.
He saw the distant blush of Pearl’s brick house, saw that her car was gone and there was no smoke from her chimney, and thought what a shame, but that of course she would be back quite soon, because the restaurant would certainly be closed early, ahead of the coming storm. It was not even four yet, he had a few hours left before Elizabeth would arrive. He crept near the house and looked in, but all was dark inside, and the dog and the cat must have been asleep together on Pearl’s bed because he didn’t see them. He balanced the bracelet box carefully on the doorknob where there would be no snow falling upon it, where she would see it as soon as she arrived. He bent low and doubled back along the ditch, hiding his footsteps, to the woods, but, once there, in the pleasant warmth, he thought he might wait a little while in case she came back, so that he would get to see her face when she opened the box and saw the bracelet. That was all he wanted: to take that vision of her happy, marvelling face with him back into the life he was meant for.
He found a stand of pine so thick that no snow could fall through its branches in this current state of windlessness, and dragged over a log, then sat with his back warm against the largest pine, taking small sips of the bourbon whenever he felt chilly. He occasionally lifted the rifle to his eye to see Pearl’s house through his scope. The day darkened all around him as the storm-heavy clouds rolled near, but he didn’t notice, as he was already under the far heavier darkness of the trees. The wind rose and the temperature decreased rapidly, but he didn’t feel it. He was just so comfortable, and his head was swimming, slowly, and the night was a good one, holding him gently in it. He thought perhaps it would be best if he just took a tiny ten-minute nap. He rested his rifle across his knees, folded his arms, and let his eyes close.
Pearl’s brothers had forbidden her, absolutely, from going back to her house while that closet-pissing creep was still out there. As soon as she saw his little mess, she’d left her place immediately and driven fast to her mother’s, seething with rage, but over the course of the day the rage had dissolved, and pity overcame her. Chip probably wasn’t so bad, just a lost little rich boy who thought he’d found a savior in her. Oh, these rich boys are all the same, she thought with disgust; of course she had known who he was from the start, he had that same pink fleshy face of all the men of his family, and maybe even she had found it touching that he pretended so hard to be who he wasn’t, salt of the earth, scion of nothing, with those ridiculous paint-spattered overalls. So she let him have his sad small lie. Live and let live. But then this morning when she had rushed into her mother’s house, and told her oldest brother about how Chip had taken to following her over the past weeks, how, just half an hour ago, she’d found clues that he’d been hiding in her house, her brother had grown pissed and loud and called his brothers and yelled at her to stay put. Which meant, of course, that she would sneakily, when they least expected it, do the opposite. She wasn’t about to let men tell her what to do. Anyways, it was probably true that Chip could use some rough love. Scare him straight back to Boston. She laughed and then felt bad; she hoped they wouldn’t hurt him too much.
In the early afternoon when her brothers had all returned to their mother’s house, grim and smelling like wind and fire, and they sat down in the dining room to squabble over the garlic rolls, Pearl did not stay put. She quietly put the cat in its carrier and whistled for the dog and went out into the brewing storm clouds and drove her mother’s car home far too fast over the abandoned highways, because she had long ago decided that she would never live her life subject to what any man thought she should do.
When she got out of the car in the dark, the wind had risen just enough to drive needles of old snow into her eyes, and she unlocked the door without seeing the pink box, which had anyway fallen into a drift, where more snow would fall upon it and it would lie for the rest of the winter and at last be uncovered by an unusually warm spell in February.
She locked the door behind her, fed the animals, and started the fire with her coat still on, knowing that her power would likely go out when the snow and ice built on the lines.
She blew on the burning newspaper until the kindling caught, and then flames licked at the logs she had chopped herself and stacked against the woodshed. She had water, she had wood, she had candles, she had food. She would be fine for a month, if need be. She was glad she’d come home.
Then Pearl let the quiet of her house seep into her and pour into and fortify the most precious quiet at the very center of her. She had not had an easy life; there had been early terror, pain, terrible heartbreaks one after the other, years of ugliness, when everyone thought she was lost. But all that was in the past. She needed other people so that she could make money to live, her body needed to fuck once in a while, but what she really needed was this solitude, deep and impenetrable.
The house was warm now. She took off her coat and turned on the reading light above her head, and the dark forest with the snow spinning fast vanished and was replaced by a dimmer version of her room, the dog, the cat, herself quite rosy in her mother’s hand-knitted sweater. She picked up the book that was sitting on the coffee table. For a moment before she began to read, she had a vision of herself as though seen from deep in the forest, an ember glowing in a tiny flicker of light. And of course at this moment Pearl did not think of Chip; she did not wonder about wherever he was just then, whether he was warming up in the shower back in his cottage, or perched slowly freezing upon a log as the snow whispered all around him and he fell into his longest sleep yet; or whether he was on the log in the night in the snow, raising the scope and thus the rifle to his face in his numb hands, seeing Pearl so whole in her life without him that his body shuddered beyond his control, his pride was touched, his finger moved, and he brought them into a greater darkness yet.
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April 27, 2021 at 10:00PM
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What's the Time, Mr. Wolf? - The New Yorker
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