by E. J. Levy
“I’m just heading to lunch,” he said. “You wanna grab some Vietnamese? You have time?”
“Sure,” she lied and cut her own class. Her students did it all the time, after all.
Later he would tell her that he’d walked that bridge every day that week—sometimes two, three times a day—hoping to run into her. He’d been ready to give up when they finally met.
“I’m glad you didn’t give up,” she said.
“So am I.”
For the first two weeks, he was an anecdote she told to friends. A punchline. A subject heading in her e-mail. She called the time they spent together “weird dates.” There was the boat show at the Convention Center. There was the polka fest in New Ulm. Miniature golf. The Laurel and Hardy film festival. A canoe trip by moonlight. Bowling, without irony. They saw each other almost every night. He was eager to get involved and made no bones about it. His divorce, he told her, had been finalized a month ago, though it had been in the hands of lawyers for a year. He was tired of being alone. He was forty-two. He had no children and no pets. He wanted some.
“Which?” she asked.
“Both,” he said.
“Do you have a breed in mind?”
On her third and final Saturday among the Wild Women, she threw out her back and had an intimation of what it would be like to be old. She called her friends from bed and told them that she wanted to die young. “Too late,” they said and laughed. “Ha ha,” she said. She lay in bed, too uncomfortable to read, too awake to sleep. She hadn’t had a chance to clean the apartment, and it hurt when she sneezed. To pee, she rolled to the edge of the bed, bent her legs over the side, and let the painful weight of gravity pull her upright, pinching a nerve as she made her way to the bathroom. To catch the phone when it rang, she charged the kitchen wall bent over.
If he hadn’t called her that Saturday night to ask how the climbing trip went, if he hadn’t come and nursed her when she told him that she’d pulled a muscle in her back, if he hadn’t been there that whole weekend, it would have been a misery. But he was. He came over straight away. He brought a brown paper sack with a bottle of Jim Beam, three fat lemons, and a jar of honey in it.
He made himself at home. He put on music (“What the heck is this?” he asked, coming on her Suicide Commandos CD and the Sex Pistols. He opted for Bach pieces played by Yo Yo Ma) and settled into the kitchen. She could hear him among her pots and pans. When he came back into her room, he had a steaming mug in one hand and a tumbler of whiskey and ice in the other.
“What’s this?” she asked, accepting the mug.
“Hot toddy,” he said.
“I strained my back,” she said. “I didn’t catch a cold.”
“An ounce of prevention,” he said, and sipped his drink.
He helped her to turn over, face down, then rubbed her neck. He massaged Tiger Balm into the muscles of her ass, working his thumbs down the knots that ran the length of her spine. He sat cross-legged at the end of the bed and took her left foot in his lap and began to massage the arch, working to the toes, then back to the heel and the ankle. Then he did the other foot. Growing old, she realized, would not be half bad if she had someone to grow old with—if she had him.
At the end of their first month together, he cooked her dinner at his place in St. Paul—a one-bedroom with a redwood deck and a garden share out back. He served her things he’d killed himself: wild duck in morel sauce; lettuce from his garden with pansies and tomatoes and dandelion greens mixed in; pumpkin soup from pumpkins he’d grown here. He took her into the bathroom so that she could see out the one window that overlooked the backyard. He pointed out the pumpkin patch below where green vines snaked across black soil. Proud as a papa.
Sometimes their dates seemed like a send-up of romance, but she knew that he was not being ironic. She liked him for this, and it gave her the creeps, his earnestness. And then, sometimes, just as she was about to write him off, he would surprise her with what he knew—star constellations and opera plots, a passion for Haydn, a fluency in French—things, it turned out, he’d learned from his ex-wife, who, it turned out, was a concert pianist and an associate professor of music at Augsburg College in town.
He didn’t talk about his ex-wife much, but he said enough.
They spent the deepest part of winter together, then together headed into spring. For the first time in ten years she had a Valentine in February. He stopped by her office hours with a hokey card (a heart framed by white lace) and a small rectangular box, maybe four inches long, an inch wide, too large to be a ring, thank God. Still, the box was weighty, and she worried that she’d be obliged by this somehow.
They’d reached that unnerving stage in romance when gifts become significant. To circumvent this, she had bought him a heart-shaped tin of chocolates with a photo of Elvis printed on the lid, each foil-wrapped chocolate shaped like a tiny guitar, and a card, which she signed Yours. He laughed at the gift and kissed her.
She shook the box he gave her, afraid to look.
“Open it,” he said.
“What’s in it?” she asked.
“You have to open it and see.”
When she unwrapped the red foil paper, she found a Swiss Army knife inside.
“It’s red, isn’t it?” he said, obviously pleased with himself. “More use than flowers.”
It was still early in their relationship and his practicality charmed her. It did not yet grate; it did not yet seem tasteless and desiccated, like freeze-dried beef. She opened each spidery arm of the knife—blade, blade, toothpick, scissors, corkscrew, blade, fork—lovingly touching each stainless steel arm.
Then he wrapped her in his arms; beneath his soap and shampoo smell, he smelled faintly of kerosene and moth balls and wet wool and sweat. She loved the way he smelled.
In the course of their relationship thus far, he’d taught her many useful things. He’d taught her how to snowshoe and ice fish, how to orienteer and winter camp. He’d taught her to stay upright on cross-country skis and how to gut a walleye. He had useful information to impart, and he was generous with it. He told her these were things to know, things that came in handy—a word he used a lot and without irony—so that you didn’t have to stay indoors all winter, not knowing that she was someone who preferred to stay indoors all summer too. He taught her how to gather morels in oak forests in spring. He taught her how to tie a fly and unzip his with her teeth.
She was grateful to him and told herself that gratitude approximated love. She craved useful information, and he had it. His hands were large and calloused; he looked wrong in anything other than flannel or cotton tees and jeans. He had to shave twice a day or his cheeks abraded her.
By June they were talking about moving in together, although she had not lived with anyone since her freshman year of college at U Mass, and he was—she knew—a slob. Moving in together was his idea, not hers. They compromised and decided to go camping instead, as a sort of trial run, a ten-day trip into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a vast chain of lakes that stretched along the border between Canada and the United States, the largest water wilderness preserve in the world, he said.
He was a slob, but he was also a control freak, so she knew it was a sign of nearly matrimonial faith that he offered to let her plan and pack the food. It was an act of trust and love. He’d pull together the equipment, he said, check the tent for holes and patch them, get packs and maps and compasses, arrange the permits, take down the canoe from the shed. They were a team after all, he said. They could depend on one another.
She thought hard about what to bring, spent hours perusing the little foil-packaged, freeze-dried meals, as if she were doing textual analysis. She visited various camping stores to check out their offerings; she read the labels, considered ingredients, weighed protein against carbs. She chose carefully. She chose snacks for them to eat on moonlight canoe trips; she designed the menus for three-course candlelight dinners (complete with candles, matches, tiny linen tablecloth, and t
wo very carefully packed china plates). “My ex-wife was always surprising me,” he’d said. She wanted to surprise him too, and to impress him. So she asked him for the army packs, and he brought them by. And then she half filled one with her sleeping roll and clothes, as he’d instructed, and the other one she filled entirely with food. Freeze-dried fettuccine Alfredo; freeze-dried chicken and dried tomato sauce and herbs; freeze-dried stroganoff; powdered milk and half-and-half; gorp and couscous and pilaf and raisins and pumpkins seeds and dried apples and beef jerky and oatmeal and margarine in a tub. A corkscrew. Pancake mix and pasta.
He picked her up before dawn, a little after five in the morning, when the sky was still a deep and sleepy midnight blue, and Jupiter and Mars glowed in the city sky alongside the Pleiades. She carried the food pack on her shoulder to the car, and he carried the other, after adding his sleeping roll and clothes. He cinched the army packs’ belts tight. They loaded the two packs into the trunk, slammed it shut in the quiet chilly air.
The drive up was lovely, the roads nearly empty, and they made good time, reaching Cloquet before nine. They had agreed to stop there to see the world’s only Frank Lloyd Wright–designed gas station, which she had read about in the guidebook to northern Minnesota and wanted to see. They took the exit west to Cloquet and drove along a wide boulevard toward town. When they saw it on the right—unmistakable—they pulled in and parked beside the pumps. No one seemed to be working, so they got out to look from different angles. The station was two stories tall and looked like one quarter of a pyramid turned upside down, so that the pyramid balanced on its apex, a single pointy corner thrust out like an arrow pointing west. The ground floor was of poured concrete, in austere angles; the second story was a sort of waiting room observation deck composed of glass that thrust out over the gas pumps like a giant beak. The whole structure looked unstable, as if it might tip into the parking lot and shatter.
“It looks like the Guggenheim with pumps,” she said.
He smiled at her vaguely, and she realized the name Guggenheim meant nothing to him; for all he knew, it could be a brand of beer.
“It’s a museum in New York City,” she said, “that Wright designed.”
He squinted at her like she’d gone blurry and he was having to fight to see her there. “I know what the Guggenheim is,” he said. “I lived in New York, after college. That’s where I met my wife.”
“Your ex-wife,” she said. “I never knew that.”
He shrugged. “I never told you.”
They had a permit to put in at a lake on the Gunflint Trail, but they drove on past the turnoff and up to Grand Portage, near the border with Canada, so that they could have breakfast at a place he loved, a log cabin restaurant that overlooked Lake Superior and served, he guaranteed, the best hot cakes she would ever eat. The pancakes were flecked with wild rice and came with thick salty pads of butter and real maple syrup, corky and sweet, and he was right. Watching the gulls arc above the lake outside the window, she thought about how close they were to the border; if they kept going, they could cross into another country. She recognized the thought as childish, but it thrilled her nevertheless to know they were that close, to know that they could leave this territory behind and together find some new and foreign ground, even if it was only Canada.
He’d told her that the Gunflint Trail would be scenic, but it was torn up and mostly mud, overrun with logging trucks carrying out huge limbless trees. There was a traffic jam and long delays, even though they could count fewer than ten cars on the road. Still the construction crews stopped them with the rest of the incoming traffic and made them wait behind handheld stop signs, flagged them on, with palms raised, meaning slow. It took them an hour to travel fifteen miles, and he was monosyllabic by the time they pulled into the gravel lot, where they would leave the car. They unloaded the gear from the trunk, and she helped him lift the canoe down from its rack on the roof. Then they each took a pack and walked down to the dock, which was run by an outfitter who charged a modest fee to let equipment and to allow people to park and put in here.
“Been a while,” the outfitter said.
“It has,” Ben said, and then he put a credit card down on the counter and said he’d leave that till they got back.
She carried the army packs down to the dock while he went back for the canoe. She could see him from the dock, heading across the grassy lawn toward the lake, the aluminum canoe worn like a long silver hat, pulled down past his ears, obscuring his head.
The lake where they put in was small and round and weedy and edged by summer cottages, more like a suburban pond than wilderness; she felt disappointment settle over her like a private fog, but she tried not to show it. As they canoed across it, they dodged motor boat waves and he told her that there wouldn’t be any motorized vehicles once they reached the Boundary Waters. She nodded, like she’d known this all along, and paddled on, relieved.
Some things, she realized, it was better not to know. It was better that she hadn’t known that—before they reached the Boundary Waters wilderness—they would have to paddle through three boggy ponds, short uninspired crossings that ended in muddy banks and mosquito-infested forests through which they’d have to trek, bearing on their backs all that they’d need to sustain them for ten days. It was better that she hadn’t heard of portaging. Portages—in which you carried the canoe from lake to lake—were, in theory, a pleasant change from sitting and paddling. But this was true in theory more than in fact. In truth, in fact, the novelty wore off fast.
By the third portage they were no longer speaking. They trudged with mute determination from one end of the trail, where they beached and left the canoe, to the other with their packs. Then they trudged back to retrieve the canoe, which he then carried through the woods on his head. She followed behind him, helping him up steep embankments, holding the tip up when the trail required climbing up a six-foot wall of rock or down steep stairs.
Halfway through the third portage, he asked her if she wanted to give it a try.
“Sure,” she said.
He tilted the canoe against a tree and ducked out from under it.
“It’s easier than it looks,” he said. “You’ll be surprised.”
She was small and not very strong and thought that maybe he would be the one who’d be surprised. But she walked under the overturned canoe as he’d instructed her to, and let him settle the yoke onto her shoulders, delicately, like a shawl, before she unhooked the bow from the tree and stood up so that the boat lifted, its weight resting solely on her. She was scared at first, and then she was amazed. The burden was surprisingly easy to bear, eighty pounds on your neck seemed light, if balanced properly. She took a few giddy steps, amazed by what he could teach her and by what she had it in her to carry. She did a little Irish jig, touching her left toe over her right foot, then right over left. She smiled at him, full of what she knew was love.
“Be careful,” he said, smiling back. “Don’t turn your ankle, Bud.” No one in the history of the world had ever called her Bud. She felt like a six-pack at the MLA. She felt great.
And then they were in wilderness. She knew they were because they passed a sign that said so, posted to the right of the trail three-quarters of the way along the portage. She hadn’t noticed it when they’d come this way before, carrying the army packs. But she saw it now, from under the brim of the canoe. Welcome to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. If there were warnings against bears or other dangers on that sign, she didn’t notice them. She noticed the hollow resonant gong as the stern knocked birches along the trail; she noticed the fingernail scrape of twigs along the metal belly of the boat. Each root and stone she had to step around. It was slow going, but she didn’t mind it. She could hear him whistling behind her on the trail. It was nice to walk through the woods with him. It was a nice change from paddling, and the woods were lovely—patches of blue sky overhead, a tunnel of green, swamp and forest, moss and wintergreen, dense and leafy along the trail. I
t was midday, but in here the air was cool and sweet.
They were paddling for the last portage of the day, the fourth and final one that would bring them to the lake at which—he promised—they’d set up camp and rest, when she noticed that he’d stopped whistling sometime back. She heard only the sound of water rushing off the bow, the slow steady dip of the paddles, the haunting song of a white-throated sparrow, high and eerie. They beached the canoe, just the sound of sand against the belly of the boat. She stepped out and grabbed the rope and pulled the bow onto shore as he had shown her, scraping the canoe on rocks a little as she hauled. He grimaced. “Careful,” he said—before tying the rope to a branch. Then he got out and began to hand her things. He hefted the food pack onto his shoulder and said, “What the hell’s in here. Rocks?” He pretended he was joking, but she knew better. She knew that he was thinking that she was the burden. Dead weight.
A hundred yards up the path, he stumbled on a root and swore, “Jesus H.,” and dropped the army pack into the muddy path where it fell over into a bed of wintergreen and sumac. There was a tinselly sound of glass striking glass, a fragile, breakable chiming.
“What in the fuck is in there?” he said.
“Food,” she said. “It’s the food pack.”
“I know it’s the food pack. What the hell did you bring?”
Without waiting for her to answer, he crouched by the side of the trail and undid the belts that cinched it closed and began to pull out things. At first he pulled out the usual items: freeze-dried this and freeze-dried that and gorp. And then, deeper down, he found the special things, the ones she’d wanted to be a surprise. He pulled out the bottle of chardonnay that she’d stowed for the romantic candlelight dinner she’d planned; he pulled out a plastic bottle of half-and-half for coffee; maple syrup; cranberry juice (in case she got a bladder infection); Jim Beam; candles and two china plates wrapped in a linen cloth, buffered from breaking by individual packets of Quaker Oats.