I nodded, staring into the jigsaw puzzle of his expression, the deep blue of an iris, the crisscross of lines beneath his eyes. I didn’t think I wanted to be a surgeon, but I said thanks anyway, because he had never sat on my bed like this, never looked at me and said I was good. My thigh muscles were clenched beneath my nightgown and I was trying to smile, wanting to love him, wanting so much.
After he left, I promised Jesus that I would behave from now on—no more secrets or sex books, no more Jacuzzi jets or lies. For a few months—until Darian Woods came to town—I would actually keep this promise.
Finally I slid under the covers and clicked off the lamp, wishing my father had stayed, wishing he would come back and say one more thing. I stared at my bedroom door, the sweet crack of light above it.
2004
DRIVING TO TAI’S HOUSE THIS FIRST TIME, MY CAR pulled up Route 9 as if by some colossal magnet, I’m wondering if I’ve passed the point of no return. Or maybe there’s not a single moment but many—many points on this prodigal path, beyond which the decision to step off gets progressively harder. I could still make it back in time to help Nathan wash the dinner dishes and quiz Hannah on her algebra. I could say my plans with my friend Jules were canceled, could undo the lie. I might stop the car now, or a moment from now, might pull into the Hess station or the mini-mart, the Look Restaurant, the lumberyard. That road to the left leads back home. I could take it.
Take it, I tell myself, even saying the words aloud into the car’s quiet interior. My voice startles me—it sounds so thin, naked as a bone, but I don’t obey. Maybe it was too late the day I walked into The Wild Rose, the day of his mouth on mine in the birches by the river.
Somehow, impossibly, I keep driving, looking for the exit to Route 112. I even have a page of directions to his house and soon I’ll have to look down at it, squinting into darkness. I can no longer pretend that I just happened to run into him, my life a series of chance encounters—accidental or fated—somehow involving no choice. The dwindling embers of this sunset remind me of California, the clouds so streaked with crimson and gold.
Pulling to the side of the road, I’m overcome with something like homesickness. I rest my forehead on the cold plastic steering wheel, waiting, breathing, while the engine clicks. Is this the magnetism of self-discovery or self-destruction—both of which have always had equal pull in my life; I’ve never been able to keep them straight, never been able to tell where one lets off and the other begins. “This desire demands everything,” Tai wrote in an e-mail this morning, in a seeming fit of desperation. So why are we following it?
At the Ashfield property, a couple weeks ago, I followed him through my overrun gardens while he talked of moisture, soil composition and disruptive species—lily of the valley was invasive, and someone had planted too much phlox. The dogwoods needed attention, and did I know we had a natural wetland area, north of the barn? I wrote notes on a clipboard, feigning professionalism. We were pretending we could work together this way, without incident. Nathan was up the hill, obsessing miserably over his trim, radio blaring.
We had argued again that morning—one of the last warm Sundays in October. He’d taken the girls kayaking on the lake and had forgotten to apply sunblock to Emmie’s china doll skin. Now she was bright and puffy as a seared tomato. I had swallowed my rebuke—he’d taken them, after all—but I’d been silently fuming. So when I came out of the house an hour later, speckled with plaster, to find him prying off the newly installed cedar clapboards, I lost it.
“Oh, my God, please tell me you’re not doing this! Dan just sided this last weekend!”
“I know, but it’s all out of level,” he sputtered, continuing his work with the crowbar.
“It’s fine, Nathan. It looked—just fine. That stuff costs a fortune!” Emmie and Hannah were squabbling over the ladder ball set in the driveway. I pretended to ignore them. “How much out of level could it possibly be?”
“The water table’s a good quarter inch out of whack.” He heaved another twenty-dollar board onto the pile. “It’s screwing up the corner board alignment. Dan’s a good worker, but his details—” Here Emmie erupted in wails of indignation, and Hannah stormed off toward the house, kicking the game apart on her way; one of the plastic ladder ball tubes smacked me in the shin.
“This family sucks,” Han said, slamming the back door. I shut my eyes, forced some deep breaths. These are the moments when you picture yourself turning away, slipping behind the wheel and just driving into silence.
“Nathan, we were supposed to move on to roof trim today, right? The siding was fine.”
“Believe me, Sylv, I’d like nothing better than to move on.”
“Really? Because it seems like—”
“Give me some space here, would you?” he snapped.
“All I ever give you is space,” I began, just as Tai’s car pulled into the mouth of our driveway, inching down the long drive, kicking up a horrible ruckus in my chest.
“Can you deal with him?” Nathan sighed. “Landscaping was your idea.”
It all felt surreal and slightly sickening. I tried not to walk too closely beside him, tried not to notice the soft, ripe fit of his jeans, the well-built wrists protruding from rolled-up shirtsleeves. Tried not to feel the way his presence set me to a new frequency as we traversed the outskirts of my property, talking.
“This kind of border just begs to be broken up.” He indicated the boundary of the old garden, where someone had planted a swath of daylilies. “The lilies want to be integrated, not used as a wall….” I took down more notes, thinking I could listen all day to that voice. He nudged his glasses up and grinned at me. “The plaster in the hair is a nice touch.”
“Oh—yeah. Lovely, isn’t it? I’m a total mess today.”
“It’s perfect, actually. A woman who can hang her own Sheetrock,” he teased, causing my cheeks to ignite. We walked silently as my face smoldered.
“Rosalyn Benton said you know all about labyrinths,” I offered as we tromped through the blackberries, boots smacking in sludge.
“She did, did she?” He chuckled. “Good old Roz.”
“She said you’re sort of famous around here.”
“Is that so?” He ripped at some sumac, smiling inscrutably. “Well, it doesn’t take much to get famous around here,” he said. “Building a stone labyrinth on your property qualifies you—good enough for the locals.” He scratched a few notes on my clipboard, standing so close I could smell his morning coffee and toast, the sweet tang of sweat and shampoo. “You’ve an amazing piece of land, Sylvia. You’ll never run out of landscapes here.”
I asked what he knew of the previous owners. “I know what most locals around here know. Jennie and John Kauffman were a pretty miserable couple. She was paranoid, depressive—kind of like my ex, only much worse—and one day she and her five-year-old daughter ended up in their car, at the bottom of the lake.”
“Jesus! That’s awful. Did she do it on purpose?”
“No one knows. There was an investigation. They decided it was an accident. She’d had too much Valium and driven off the road. This was back in the late eighties.”
“Did you know her?” The wind blew a clump of curls into my eyes and Tai reached to brush it away, then caught himself, stroked his own beard instead.
“No. I met Kauffman when he was still deep in mourning, though. He stayed on for a decade. Letting the place go. It wasn’t pretty.” As we trudged up the hill, I shivered at the thought of Jennie Kauffman plunging down the embankment, the terror in the little girl’s eyes as the car filled with lake water. Tai turned suddenly, swept up a fistful of clay and held it before me; for a brief, fascinating moment, I thought he might smear it across my face. “Sooner or later, darling, everything returns,” he stated then spread the earth over his own ropy forearm.
Then he beamed his madman smile, and I knew I’d end up at his house, somehow.
June bugs smash their weighty bodies against his windows as I walk in. Or no.
Those can’t be June bugs, because it’s early November, and winter’s breath is already on the air, stinging the skin of my cheeks. It’s just the rain, grown suddenly boisterous in this instant as I walk through the door into warmth and his smell.
“Come on in,” he says, too politely, I think. He’s trying to tell me something with the tilt of his head, one eyebrow raised high as a flag in warning. “I tried to call you,” he whispers.
“Let me take your coat.” He peels off my leather jacket with the stiff formality of a cocktail party host. And then I see Eli, sitting on a white couch in the open living room, bordered by blind windows. “Eli—look who’s here,” Tai says, more in his normal voice, the voice I’ve come to crave like a drug—a voice like warm tar, asphalt after rain. Eli stands. He’s surprised to see me, and rightly so—almost seven o’clock on a Thursday night, and I don’t exactly live around the corner—it’s taken over an hour to find my way to this cottage in the Plainfield woods. He comes across the wide room and I rack my brain for what to say, why I’m here, while Tai deserts us to take something from the oven. I catch the fresh, yeasty odor of bread.
“Eli. It’s wonderful to see you.” I gather up my poise, smoothing the tremors from my voice as if I’m twelve again, at one of my mother’s makeup parties, entertaining the doctors’ wives. I glimpse my own reflection in the liquid glass—maroon lipstick, black V-neck sweater and jeans, hair swept up. The room isn’t large but gives the illusion of space, with rough-hewn furniture and exposed beams. A fire jumps on the grate. There are books and Japanese prints against the walls, a hunting rifle slung over the hearth. Eli shoves his hands in his pockets, rocking on his soles the way Tai sometimes does. Tom Waits’s off-key blues keens from the stereo. I wonder how fast I can bolt back through the door, dive into my van and void this mistake.
“Sylvia wanted to talk to you about your artwork,” Tai calls from the kitchen.
“Uh, sorry I haven’t been to class,” Eli mutters, and I realize with shame and relief how close I was to throwing myself into his father’s arms a minute ago. “I’ve just been, like, kind of hanging by a thread at school.” He’s playing the naughty boy, staring at his feet, twisted with guilt of his own. I’m the teacher, here or anywhere. He doesn’t suspect anything, I don’t think. Not yet. Tai comes out wearing green oven mitts, setting a loaf on the pine table, next to a bowl of olives. Then he opens the French doors and whistles.
I try to play along. “Eli. It’s just—you’ve got a gift, and I hate to see you throw it away,” I say. He nods. Yuki, Tai’s white German shepherd, bounds toward me. I put out my hand for her to sniff, stifling the urge to call her by name. Surely Eli would find that dubious.
Tai leads me across the room, seats me on the low couch facing a pine coffee table adorned with a vase full of some orange flower I can’t name. Eli sprawls on floor pillows near the fire. I sit on the edge of my seat, stiff-backed, trying to exude teacher-ness with every fiber.
Tai hands me a glass of red wine as Yuki settles in beside Eli, lets out a halfhearted growl and drops her head on her paws.
“So, you really think I’ve got something?” Eli says after an impossible silence and I realize that he has bought it—this story about his art teacher driving up a mountain through a November rain to talk to him about his endangered potential. He is seventeen, after all, turbulent and self-absorbed. It wouldn’t occur to him that I’ve come here for any reason other than this. I center myself again, trying to breathe.
“Of course—you’re very talented,” I tell him. “And not just that; you’ve got a special vision, Eli, a really unique way of seeing the world.” I steal another sip of wine, glance at Tai, who is sitting at the pine table now, head resting in his hand, eyes shut.
Eli has sat up and is attentive, ready for more information about himself. I sense that he needs this talking to—he’s hungry for some crumb of direction or encouragement.
“Look over here,” I say, standing and pointing to the wall beside the hearth, where Eli’s framed print hangs—one he finished in my workshop last spring. “Look how you created a sense of tension with the diagonals in the buildings,” I tell him. “And these windows invite the viewer in, almost making us feel like voyeurs….” I’m drawing on all my old MFA bullshit, and yet, I also know I’m speaking truth. He is gifted.
“But it takes way more than talent to make great art,” I conclude. “It takes really hard work, Eli. It takes incredible persistence and dedication. And you have to be willing to make mistakes, make a mess of it. Throw away ten, fifteen pieces for each one you keep, you know? ‘Everyone has the right to make an ass of himself,’ as Maude says to Harold.”
“Huh? You lost me there.”
Tai lets out a laugh from his spot at the table. I’d almost forgotten he was there.
“Never mind,” I say. “The important thing is that you should study, and work hard, because without that, talent is about as useful as a turkey sandwich.”
“Wow. You’ve got some funky metaphors.” Eli stands and stretches luxuriously, checks his watch. He’s heard enough, I gather. I find myself noticing how he’s got his father’s compact muscularity and fine bones. “You’re losing me a little, Ms. Sandon,” he says, “but I totally appreciate this advice. It’s, like, kind of amazing that you came up here.”
“Well, you know. You’re worth it,” I try, burning with shame.
“Well, maybe I won’t enlist after all,” he smirks, looking at his watch again. I shoot Tai a look. He nods and shrugs. “I wish I could, you know, hang out and shoot the shit with you guys some more, but Zac’s coming by—”
“You heading out?” Tai asks.
“Yeah, we’re gonna hear his brother’s band at Pearl Street.”
“Right. And then?” Someone honks from the driveway and Eli walks to the front door, grabs his jacket off a hook.
“I’ll probably crash at Mom’s, if that’s okay.”
“It’s her night, after all,” Tai says. “Glad you came by.” He hands his son some money, thumps his shoulder. “I’ll just chat with Sylvia a minute. You be careful.”
Eli starts out the door, then turns around, smiles his crooked smile.
“See you in class, Ms. Sandon,” he says, and then, “You be careful, too, Dad.” Then he’s gone, and there’s nothing left to divert my attention from where I am, why I’ve come.
As Tai shuts the door behind Eli, leans one knotted forearm against it, I start to tremble again. I’m all jammed up with some thick emotion I can’t name or release. Tai sighs deeply. “Well,” he declares, shaking his head. “That was just—incredible.” He comes toward me, the jade eyes glinting, the rogue-boy smile electric. “Really something.”
“Is he seriously thinking of enlisting?” I collapse onto the sofa. He clicks off the stereo, and I take a hefty gulp of wine, clutch my elbows to contain the tremors overtaking me in waves.
“Not after hearing so eloquently about his artistic merits and the value of perseverance!” He settles on the sofa near me, plucks an olive from the bowl, shaking his head. Though we aren’t touching, I can feel his warmth through my jeans. “You were pretty convincing.”
“Well, it was all true. I mean, I may have exaggerated a little.” Tai hands me an olive, and I shake my head no. “Do you think he believed me?”
“Yes! Though I’m not sure he believes that’s why you’re here. He’s not a stupid kid.” He rifles his fingers through his hair, as if trying to dislodge some irksome thought. “He thinks I’m a scoundrel,” he says tiredly, stealing the wineglass from my hand, putting it to his own lovely lips. “But I bet you’ll see him back in class.” Setting down the glass, he places a hand on my leg, still shaking his head. “Christ—you’re shivering.”
“I can’t be here,” I say. “Eli suspects—”
“He’ll keep his suspicions to himself.” He faces me on the couch, traces the outline of my elbow. “He’s a private guy.”
“But it’s not fair to him!”
A bubble of panic expands in my throat. It’s as if I’ve woken from a dream to find my self in the wrong house, wrong life. “It’s a—a burden he shouldn’t have to carry.” Saying it, I can feel the exact weight and texture of that burden, its particular size and density—a painful, familiar cyst. I stand up to leave.
“I don’t think he’ll take it on that way.” Gripping my hand, he pulls me firmly back onto the sofa. The tremors have conquered my body now—a full throttle 7.2 earthquake.
“Tai, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. I can’t stay.”
“Of course you can’t stay.” He begins massaging my right hand, eyes deep and steady as rivers. “You’ve got your kids to get back to. But you can finish your wine, right? Besides, it’s pouring. And I can’t send you off shaking like an epileptic. It’s not safe.”
At this I laugh a little.
“Here, let me do this properly,” he says, positioning himself on the coffee table’s edge facing me, scooting in close. “Is this the hand that aches?”
“Sometimes. Mostly when I paint.”
After a few silent minutes, he moves to my left hand. The pressure and warmth of his fingers on my palm, my wrist, the muscles of my forearm begin to calm me; the shaking subsides. Suddenly I’m aching for a cigarette, though I haven’t smoked once in fourteen years.
“Do you have any of those Camels you sometimes smoke?”
“They’re in the fridge,” he mutters, his fingers rolling over the tendons in my hand. “I’ve had my two for the day, but you’re welcome to them.” He’s intent on his work now, head down, hands efficient and surprisingly skilled. Staring at them, I feel a single strong beat of desire.
“How can you be so damned disciplined?”
He looks up, surprised. Then he laughs, takes his glasses off and sets them on the table. “If I were so disciplined, would I really be seducing my son’s married art teacher?” He exhales, pressing his fingers into his eyes, shakes his head. “Tell me, Sylvia—should I send you home?”
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