Mitch peered down into his ashtray as into a prison yard crowded with dusty inmates, considering how to squeeze another in. “Who appointed you Jesus Christ around here?” he said, unoriginally. “I don’t have to negotiate with you.”
But Dorothy refused to talk to Mitch (“I’d rather just sell the house,” she said), and Walter, at the end of the school year, which was also the start of the motel’s high season, such as it was, decided to force the issue by going on strike. As long as he was around the motel, he couldn’t not do the things that needed doing. The only way to make Mitch take responsibility was to leave, and so he announced that he was going to spend the summer fixing up the lake house and making an experimental nature film. His father said that if he wanted to get the house into better shape to be sold, that was fine with him, but the house would be sold in any case. His mother begged him to forget about the house. She said it had been selfish of her to make such a big deal about it, she didn’t care about the house, she just wanted everyone to get along, and when Walter said that he was going anyway, she cried out that if he really cared about her wishes he would not be leaving. But he was feeling, for the first time, truly angry with her. It didn’t matter how much she loved him or how well he understood her—he hated her for submitting so meekly to his father and his brother. He was sick to death of it. He got his best friend, Mary Siltala, to drive him down to the lake house with a duffel bag of clothes, ten gallons of house paint, his old one-speed bike, a secondhand paperback copy of Walden, the Super-8 movie camera that he’d borrowed from the high-school AV Department, and eight yellow boxes of Super-8 film. It was by far the most rebellious thing he’d ever done.
The house was full of mouse droppings and dead sow bugs and needed, besides repainting, a new roof and new window screens. On his first day there, Walter cleaned house and cut weeds for ten hours and then went walking in the woods, in the changeless late-afternoon sunlight, seeking beauty in nature. He had only twenty-four minutes of film stock, and after wasting three of these minutes on chipmunks he realized he needed something less attainable to pursue. The lake was too small for loons, but when he took his grandfather’s fabric canoe out into its seldom-disturbed recesses he flushed a heronlike bird, a bittern that was nesting in the reeds. Bitterns were perfect—so retiring that he could stalk them all summer without using up twenty-one minutes of film. He imagined making an experimental short called “Bitternness.”
He got up at five every morning, applied DEET, and paddled very slowly and silently toward the reeds, the camera on his lap. The bittern way was to lurk among the reeds, camouflaged by their fine vertical striping of buff and brown, and spear small animals with their bills.
When they sensed danger, they froze with their necks outstretched and their bills pointing skyward, looking like dry reeds. When Walter edged closer, hoping to see more of bitternness and less of nothing in the range finder, they usually slipped out of sight but sometimes, instead, heaved themselves into flight, which he leaned back wildly to follow with the camera. Although they were pure killing machines, he found them highly sympathetic, especially for the contrast between their drab stalking plumage and the dramatic bold gray and slaty black of their outstretched wings when they were airborne. They were humble and furtive on the ground, near their marshy home, but lordly in the sky.
Seventeen years in cramped quarters with his family had given him a thirst for solitude whose unquenchability he was discovering only now. To hear nothing but wind, birdsong, insects, fish jumping, branches squeaking, birch leaves scraping as they tumbled against each other: he kept stopping to savor this unsilent silence as he scraped paint from the house’s outer walls. The round trip to the food co-op in Fen City took ninety minutes on his bicycle. He made big pots of lentil stew and bean soup, using recipes of his mother’s, and in the evening he played with the ancient but still workable springdriven pinball machine that had been in the house forever. He read in bed until midnight and even then didn’t fall asleep immediately but lay soaking up the silence.
One late afternoon, a Friday, his tenth day at the lake, when he was returning in the canoe with some fresh unsatisfactory bittern footage, he heard car engines, loud music, and then motorcycles coming down the long driveway. By the time he got the canoe out of the water, Mitch and sexy Brenda and three other couples—three goon buddies of Mitch’s and three girls in sprayed-on bell-bottoms and halter tops—were unloading beer and camping gear and coolers onto the lawn behind the house. A diesel pickup was idling with a smoker’s cough, powering a sound system loaded with Aerosmith. One of the goon friends had a stud-collared Rottweiler on a towing-chain leash.
“Hey, nature boy,” Mitch said. “I hope you don’t mind some company.”
“Yeah, I do mind,” Walter said, blushing, in spite of himself, at how uncool he must have looked to the company. “I mind a lot. I’m here alone. You can’t be here.”
“Yes I can,” Mitch said. “In fact, it’s you that shouldn’t be here. You can stay tonight if you want, but I’m here now. You are on my property.”
“This is not your property.”
“I’m renting it now. You wanted me to pay rent, and this is what I’m renting.”
“What about your job?”
“I quit. I’m out of there.”
Walter, near tears, went into the house and hid the camera in a laundry basket. Then he rode his bicycle through a twilight suddenly drained of charm and filled with mosquitoes and hostility, and called home from the pay phone outside the Fen City Co-op. Yes, his mother confirmed, she and Mitch and his father had had angry words and decided that the best solution was to keep the house in the family and let Mitch do the repairs on it and learn to take more responsibility.
“Mom, it’s going to be party central. He’s going to burn the house down.”
“Well, I just feel more comfortable having you here and Mitch on his own,” she said. “You were right about that, sweetie. And now you can come home. We miss you, and you’re not really old enough to be by yourself all summer.”
“But I’m having a great time out here. I’m getting so much done.”
“I’m sorry about that, Walter. But this is what we’ve decided.”
Biking back to the house in near-darkness, he could hear the noise from half a mile away. Cock-rock guitar soloing, blunt drunken shouting, the dog baying, firecrackers, a motorcycle engine sputtering and screaming. Mitch and his friends had pitched tents and built a big fire and were attempting to flame-broil hamburgers in a cloud of pot smoke. They didn’t even look at Walter as he went inside. He locked himself in the bedroom and lay in bed and let himself be tortured by the noise. Why couldn’t they be quiet? Why this need to sonically assault a world in which some people appreciated silence? The din went on and on and on. It produced a fever to which everyone else was apparently immune. A fever of self-pitying alienation. Which, as it raged in Walter that night, scarred him permanently with hatred of the bellowing vox populi, and also, curiously, with an aversion to the outdoor world. He’d come openhearted to nature, and nature, in its weakness, which was like his mother’s weakness, had let him down. Had allowed itself so easily to be overrun by noisy idiots. He loved nature, but only abstractly, and no more than he loved good novels or foreign movies, and less than he came to love Patty and his kids, and so, for the next twenty years, he made himself a city person. Even when he left 3M to do conservation work, his primary interest in working for the Conservancy, and later for the Trust, was to safeguard pockets of nature from loutish country people like his brother. The love he felt for the creatures whose habitat he was protecting was founded on projection: on identification with their own wish to be left alone by noisy human beings.
Excepting some months in prison, when Brenda was alone with their little girls, Mitch lived in the lake house continuously until Gene died, six years later. He put a new roof on it and arrested its general decay, but he also felled several of the biggest and prettiest trees on the property, den
uded the lakeside slope as a playground for his dogs, and hacked a snowmobile trail around to the far corner of the lake, where the bitterns had once nested. As far as Walter could determine, he never paid Gene and Dorothy a cent of rent.
Did the founder of the Traumatics even know what trauma was? This was what trauma was: going downstairs to your office early on a Sunday morning, thinking happily of your children, both of whom had made you very proud in the last two days, and finding on your desk a long manuscript, composed by your wife, that confirmed the worst fears you’d ever had about her and yourself and your best friend. The only remotely comparable experience in Walter’s life had been the first time he’d masturbated, in Room 6 of the Whispering Pines, following the friendly instructions (“Use Vaseline”) provided by his cousin Leif. He’d been fourteen, and the pleasure had so dwarfed all previous known pleasures, and the outcome had been so cataclysmic and astonishing, that he’d felt like a sci-fi hero wrenched four-dimensionally from an aged planet to a fresh one. And Patty’s manuscript was similarly compelling and transformative. His reading of it seemed, like that first masturbation, to last a single instant. He stood up once, early on, to lock his office door, and then he was reading the last page, and it was exactly 10:12 a.m., and the sun beating on his office windows was a different sun from the one he’d always known. It was a yellowy, mean star in some strange, forsaken corner of the galaxy, and his own head was no less altered by the interstellar distance he’d traversed. He carried the manuscript out of his office and past Lalitha, who was typing at her desk.
“Good morning, Walter.”
“Good morning,” he said with a shudder at her nice morning smell. He walked on through the kitchen and up the back staircase to the little room where the love of his life was still in her flannel pajamas, ensconced in a nest of bedding on her sofa, holding a mug of creamed coffee, and watching some sports-channel roundup of the NCAA basketball tournament. The smile she gave him—a smile that was like the last flash of the familiar sun he’d lost—turned to horror when she saw what he was holding.
“Oh, shit,” she said, turning off the television. “Oh, shit, Walter. Oh, oh, oh.” She shook her head vehemently. “No,” she said. “No, no, no.”
He closed the door behind him and slid down with his back against it until he was sitting on the floor. Patty drew breath, and then drew more breath, and more breath, and didn’t speak. The light in the windows was unearthly. Walter shuddered again, his molars clicking as he sought to control himself.
“I don’t know where you got that,” Patty said. “But it was not for you. I gave it to Richard last night to get him away from me. I wanted him out of our life! I was trying to get rid of him, Walter. I don’t know why he did that! It’s so horrible that he did that!”
From a distance of many parsecs, he heard her start crying.
“I never meant you to read that,” she said in a keening high voice. “I swear to God, Walter. I swear to God. I’ve spent my whole life trying not to hurt you. You’re so good to me, you don’t deserve this.”
She cried for some long while then, some ten or a hundred minutes. All regular Sunday-morning programming was suspended for the emergency, the day’s normal course so thoroughly obliterated that he couldn’t even feel nostalgia for it. As chance would have things, the spot on the floor directly in front of him had been the scene of a different kind of emergency just three nights earlier, a benign emergency, a pleasurably traumatic coupling that in hindsight now looked like a harbinger of this malignant emergency. He’d come upstairs late on Thursday evening and attacked Patty sexually. Had performed, with her surprised consent, the violent actions which, without her consent, would have been a rapist’s: had yanked off her black work pants, pushed her to the floor, and rammed his way inside her. If it had ever occurred to him to do this in the past, he wouldn’t have done it, because he couldn’t forget that she’d been raped as a girl. But the day had been so long and disorienting—his near-infidelity with Lalitha so inflaming, the roadblock in Wyoming County so infuriating, the humility in Joey’s voice on the telephone so unprecedented and gratifying—that Patty had suddenly seemed, when he walked into her room, like his object. His obstinate object, his frustrating wife. And he was sick of it, sick of all the reasoning and understanding, and so he threw her on the floor and fucked her like a brute. The look of discovery on her face then, which must have mirrored the look on his own face, made him stop almost as soon as they’d got started. Stop and pull out and straddle her chest and stick his erection, which seemed twice its usual size, into her face. To show her who he was becoming. They were both smiling like crazy. And then he was back inside her, and instead of her usual demure little sighs of encouragement she was giving forth loud screams, and this inflamed him all the more; and the next morning, when he went down to the office, he could tell from Lalitha’s chilly silence that the screaming had filled the whole large house. Something had begun on Thursday night, he hadn’t been sure what. But now her manuscript had shown him what. The end was what. She’d never really loved him. She’d wanted what his evil friend had. The whole thing now made him glad he hadn’t broken the promise he’d given Joey at dinner in Alexandria the following night, the promise that he not tell anybody, but especially not tell Patty, that he’d married Connie Monaghan. This secret, as well as several other more alarming ones that Joey had vouchsafed, had been weighing on Walter all weekend, all through the long meeting and the concert the day before. He’d been feeling bad about keeping Patty in the dark about the marriage, feeling as if he were betraying her. But now he could see that, as betrayals went, this one was laughably small. Cryably small.
“Is Richard still in the house?” she said finally, wiping her face with a bedsheet.
“No. I heard him go out before I got up. I don’t think he’s come back.”
“Well, thank goodness for small mercies.”
How he loved her voice! It murdered him to hear it now.
“Did you guys fuck last night?” he said. “I heard talking in the kitchen.”
His own voice was harsh like a crow’s, and Patty took a deep breath, as if settling in for prolonged abuse. “No,” she said. “We talked and then I went to bed. I told you, it’s over. There was a little problem years ago, but it is over.”
“Mistakes were made.”
“You have to believe me, Walter. It is really, really over.”
“Except I don’t do for you physically what my best friend does. Never did, apparently. And never will.”
“Ohhh,” she said, closing her eyes prayerfully, “please don’t quote me. Call me a whore, call me the nightmare of your life, but please try not to quote me. Have that little bit of mercy, if you can.”
“He may suck at chess, but he’s definitely winning at the other game.”
“OK,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut tighter. “You’re going to quote me. OK. Quote me. Go ahead. Do what you have to do. I know I don’t deserve mercy. Just please know that it’s the worst thing you can do.”
“Sorry. I thought you liked talking about him. In fact, I thought that was the main point of interest in talking to me.”
“You’re right. It was. I won’t lie to you. It was, for about three months. But that was twenty-five years ago, before I fell in love with you and made a life with you.”
“And what a satisfying life that’s been. ‘Nothing so wrong with it,’ I believe your phrase was. Although the facts on the ground would appear to suggest otherwise.”
She grimaced, her eyes still shut. “Maybe you want to just read through the whole thing now and pick out all the worst lines. Do you want to just do that and get it over with?”
“Actually, what I want to do is stuff it down your throat. I want to see you fucking gag on it.”
“OK. You can do that. It would sort of be a relief from what I’m feeling now.”
He’d been clutching the manuscript so hard that his hand was cramped. He released it and let it slide between his leg
s. “I don’t actually have anything else to say,” he said. “I think we’ve pretty much covered the main points.”
She nodded. “Good.”
“Except I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want to be in the same room with you again. I don’t want to hear that person’s name again. I don’t want to have anything to do with either of you. Ever. I just want to be alone so I can contemplate having wasted my entire life loving you.”
“Yes, OK,” she said, nodding again. “But also no? No, I don’t agree to that.”
“I don’t care if you agree.”
“I know you don’t. But listen to me.” She sniffed hard, composing herself, and set her mug of coffee on the floor. Her tears had softened her eyes and reddened her lips and made her very pretty, if you cared about her prettiness, which Walter no longer did. “I never intended you to read that,” she said.
“What the fuck is it doing in my house if you didn’t intend that?”
“You can believe me or not, but it’s the truth. It was just a thing I had to write for myself, to try to get better. It was a therapy project, Walter. I gave it to Richard last night to try to explain why I stayed with you. Always stayed with you. Still want to stay with you. I know there’s stuff in there that must be horrible for you to read, I can hardly even imagine how horrible, but that’s not all there is in it. I wrote it when I was depressed, and it’s full of all the bad things I was feeling. But I’ve finally been starting to feel better. Especially after what happened the other night—I was feeling better! Like we were finally having some kind of breakthrough! Isn’t that how you felt, too?”
“I don’t know what I felt.”
“I wrote nice things about you, too, didn’t I? Many, many more nice things than not nice? If you look at it objectively? Which I know you can’t, but still, anybody else except you could see the nice things. That you’ve been kinder to me than I ever thought I deserved to have someone be. That you’re the most excellent person I’ve ever met. That you and Joey and Jessie are my whole life. That it was only one small bad part of me that ever looked anywhere else, for a little while, at a really bad point in my life.”
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