White Plains

by David Hicks

  “Only if Mama Bear lets you,” Sydney said. “Don’t forget, you’ll be closer to the cave now.”

  It was eighty degrees out, even though it was early April. To the west, in the vast and lonely Utah desert, it was probably closer to ninety. To the east, over the Rockies, it was snowing. Flynn started to worry about Casey and the horses, but then he remembered that six days after he had left the ranch, a new boyfriend had moved in.

  Sydney pointed to the bright landscape below them, then to the anvil-shaped cloud that had been swelling and graying over the course of their hike. “You’re never going to see this again,” she said. “It’s probably sleeting right now in Scrotum.”

  Flynn nodded. He had spent six years in upstate New York and knew all about the weather there, the gray that settled in around October and didn’t leave until late April. It would be the same in northeastern Pennsylvania. But he felt certain he could bring the Colorado sunshine—or the feeling of the sunshine, anyway—with him when he moved.

  A shard of it beamed onto the Alpine Building downtown, while at the same time they heard the rumble of thunder, from the same gray cloud Sydney had pointed out. They were exposed on a ridge at six thousand feet, with no tall trees nearby. Flynn heard his father’s voice in his head: What are you, nuts? Get inside where you belong.

  “Ah, it’s just a bunch of rocks,” Sydney said, waving at the scenery. “You won’t miss it.” She put her hands up to her eyes, and when she removed them, her face was red. “Who am I going to talk to now?” she said, her voice cracking. “Nobody else listens to me.”

  *

  Flynn had signed a special contract with Sacred Heart: instead of starting in September, when the fall semester began, he was to start May first and work over the summer to clean up the mess that was the English Department. They’d dropped from forty-one majors to twenty-three, and the six full-time faculty members despised one another. On his first day there, during finals week, Flynn was introduced to them, some of whom he had met in his teleconference interview: three men with beards, another with a toupee, and two women: one stinking of alcohol, the other wearing clothing from the Truman Administration. “Sweet Jesus,” muttered the toupeed man, who’d been the department chair for the last fifteen years. “They’ve replaced me with John Travolta.”

  The alcoholic shook Flynn’s hand with alarming vigor and asked if he needed anything. When he said he supposed he could use some water, she ran downstairs, bought him a bottle from a vending machine, found a cup with ice, and rushed it back to him. The toupeed man rolled his eyes.

  After that, the faculty members disbursed, as they had grading to do, and Flynn was taken downstairs to get things squared away at the Dean’s Office. An attractive woman with over-washed hair typed in all his information, and when she asked him for his marital status he said, “Divorced.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  He’d been free and clear of his marriage for over a year, although he still owed thousands of dollars to his lawyer and had barely seen his children. When he had flown out for his first official visit as a divorced father a year earlier, on Memorial Day, he had emailed Rachel his information and left her phone messages, but when he pulled up in his rental car, he found nobody home. After trying again on Father’s Day, then calling his lawyer and arranging for a hearing at Broome County Family Court (in which he participated by phone), he managed to see Nathan and Janey for a full weekend in August, then on Labor Day weekend, then Halloween weekend (sleeping on the couch at Rachel’s house while she went away with Sam, her boyfriend), then Thanksgiving week at his mother’s, and a brief visit on Christmas Eve—all with conditions, all preceded by negotiations, but all visits nonetheless. When he had told Rachel about his new job in Scranton, she had immediately petitioned for an increase in child support and sent him an email: Don’t think you’re going to just waltz in here and be their father again.

  On his second day at Sacred Heart, the woman from the Dean’s Office came to Flynn’s office with a small but weighty loaf wrapped in tin foil. She wore a tight top stretched over impressive breasts. Behind her, Flynn’s toupeed colleague appeared in the doorway, raised his eyebrows, and went back to his office. He was a Victorian scholar named Joseph, and he’d been forced to abandon the chairmanship when the squabbling among the faculty had erupted into a full-fledged war.

  “I’m kind of famous around here for my banana bread,” the woman said, placing the loaf on the corner of his desk. She looked to be about five years older than Flynn. “I know what it’s like,” she said, “all alone in a strange area, no friends . . .” She reached to give his shoulder a sympathetic pat, and when she did, the fabric of her blouse strained to the brink of tearing. “Anyway,” she said, placing her hands on her hips, “if you’d like a nice home-cooked meal as you’re settling in, you know where to find me.” She laughed, seeming a little embarrassed, but then winked.

  “Thank you,” Flynn said, and watched her walk away.

  When she was safely downstairs, Joseph stepped back into the doorway. “Botched boob job,” he whispered. “One’s bigger than the other. I saw you staring.”

  Flynn put his head in his hands.

  “Her husband left her for a younger woman,” Joseph said, leaning against the doorframe, “so she went in for an upgrade.” He rolled his eyes again, and Flynn realized he was gay. “But this ain’t Malibu, right? There’s only one plastic surgeon in the county that’s any good, and she went to . . . the other guy.”

  Flynn felt a pang of sympathy for the woman. “I feel like— ”

  “Don’t sweat it, sweetheart,” he said. “We’ve all looked. How can you not? She showcases them in the storefront window. She should hang a For Sale sign on her chest: Going Out of Business, twenty percent off.”

  Flynn held up the aluminum-wrapped loaf. “I love banana bread,” he said.

  Joseph pursed his lips. “Wait,” he said. “You’re single?”

  Flynn nodded, and Joseph let out a low whistle. “Then let the games begin.”

  *

  “When a woman makes you banana bread,” Sydney said when Flynn called her that evening, “it means she wants your banana. It means, ‘I would bake for you every night if you would only marry me’.”

  “It felt more nurturing than sexual,” Flynn said.

  “If by ‘nurturing’ you mean she wanted to breastfeed you,” Sydney said, “then yes.”

  Flynn stared at one of the placemats, which showed a creek lined by tall trees, a heron standing in the water. “Syd, she doesn’t even know me.”

  Sydney sighed into Flynn’s ear. “How is it possible for a man to reach the ripe old age of thirty-eight,” she said, “and still be such a moron about women?”

  Flynn looked out the window, at the blanket of gray sky, and told her how long it had been since he’d seen the sun.

  “It’s a hundred fucking degrees here,” Sydney said with a yawn. “We could use a little of that gray.” She told him she was sick of her students talking about the sunshine, about the vast and powerful beauty of the West. “It’s a desert,” she said. “Yesterday one of them asked me where I go to see something beautiful, and I said, ‘I don’t have to go anywhere; I just look in the mirror.’”

  Flynn heard the tinny sound of sirens in the background, and asked if she was watching an ER rerun. Sydney moaned nostalgically. “The Clooney era,” she said.

  “You should have volunteered as an extra,” Flynn said, “back when you lived in L.A. You could have been a patient consulting Noah Wyle about breast reductions. He’d have laid you out in O.R. and taken a look.” He closed his eyes and imagined Sydney’s breasts, unveiled on the operating table.

  As raindrops began to pelt the tiny windows, Helen’s cat mewled from outside. “The OR of ER,” Sydney said, “would be a hell of a lot better than the PA where you are.”

  *

  After his firs
t day at Sacred Heart, Flynn sent Rachel an email requesting a visit the following weekend, and he cc’d his lawyer. It wasn’t his scheduled visitation, but he hadn’t seen them since March. He was excited about his move and couldn’t wait to tell them they would soon be able to see one another almost every weekend, and he would be coming to their school events, and he had some weekend trip ideas: to Cayuga Lake, where Briggs, his former roommate, now lived; to New York City, so they could walk through Times Square, go up the Empire State Building, visit his old friend Peter, and show them where he and their mother first lived together; to Boston and Concord, where his favorite writers used to live; and to White Plains, so they could see their grandmother, Auntie Annie, Uncle Mitch, and their cousins.

  When he didn’t hear back by Friday, he couldn’t stand it anymore. It was as if a primitive lust for the smell of their skin had taken over his being. He drove up to Binghamton, speeding the whole way, but when he arrived at Rachel’s house and rang the doorbell, nobody answered. He saw her new car, a yellow Jeep Wrangler, in the garage, so he kept ringing, and for a moment he saw Nathan’s face pressed to the upstairs window. He stepped back and called his son’s name, again and again, then shouted it from the driveway like a repressed Marlon Brando; but when the neighbor across the street came out on her porch, looking alarmed, he finally gave up. He found a napkin in his car, scribbled a note to the kids, went up to the neighbor and asked if she would deliver it to Nathan the next time she saw him outside. She said she would. She introduced herself and told him that she was the one who watched the kids after school, and that Nathan had told her about the 3:30 calls. “It’s awful,” she said. “What Rachel is doing to you. I’ve seen you, coming here . . . ” She kept glancing over his shoulder as she spoke, and when Flynn tried to shake her hand to thank her, she shook her head quickly and hustled back inside. When he got home, he looked up the neighbor’s number and called her, and she told Flynn that after he left, Rachel had sprinted over to her house, insisted on seeing the note, and ripped the napkin to shreds.

  “What on earth did you do,” she asked, “to make that woman so angry?”

  Here’s what Flynn did: he left. He betrayed his wedding vows. He was the love of Rachel’s life, and he had dumped her without any warning, and it only made things worse that he did so years after he realized he didn’t love her. In fact, that had been the meanest part, to have kept his eroding feelings to himself for so long instead of taking action right away, back when they still may have had a chance. If one of them was to blame for the disintegration of their marriage, it would have to be the one who hadn’t been honest, the one who had hidden his feelings instead of declaring them, the one who eagerly sacrificed his personal needs so that he could resent the other, the one who had never told the other that his love for her was from the very beginning a wounded butterfly, and whether by holding it tenderly, ignoring it completely, examining it at arm’s length, or chafing its wings, he had soiled it, and killed it, by degrees.

  *

  With most of the faculty off for the summer, Flynn worked alone at his office until well after the staff had gone home. He ate jalapeño potato chips and strawberry Pop-tarts from the vending machine. He drank Jolt soda. He engaged in meaningful conversations with the cleaning woman.

  When he drove north on Interstate 81 to scope out towns where he might live, he passed enormous pyramids of ash, a billboard with pictures of dead fetuses, and a half-mile-long car dump the highway had been built around. He exited onto Route 6, since on the map it looked like a small road heading into a quiet town, but he found himself on some other Route 6, with a large shopping mall and a string of chain stores and chain restaurants alongside the road: Denny’s, Toys “R” Us, Babies “R” Us, Long John Silver’s, Burger King, Walmart, TGI Fridays, Denny’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Casual Male, Suburban Casuals. He turned right and headed back towards the highway, passing Chipotle, Red Robin, Panera, Michael’s, TJ Maxx, Home Depot, Taco Bell, Royal Buffet, and Ruby Tuesday. Pulling into the parking lot of the Viewmont Mall—on the hill Helen had pointed towards, the area that had once looked like the placemats—he tried to imagine how long ago the trees had been cut down, how long since there had been a view from this mont. Down in the valley was the city of Scranton, stretched south by a string of old coal-mining towns, the Susquehanna filtering through them before widening and surging into Wilkes-Barre. There were smokestacks, landfills, and a grand junction of highways: I-81, I-84, I-80, the Scranton Expressway, I-380, the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Flynn thought of his father, who had worked for a company that made cabinet parts and had traveled north from White Plains to towns like Poughkeepsie, Monticello, and Nyack. Had northeastern Pennsylvania been part of his territory? Had he driven here to Dickson City and sold parts to these stores on the new Route 6? Had he pulled over at this same spot and gazed out at this same barren landscape?

  *

  Apparently there weren’t too many educated single men in the greater Scranton area, because in his first month there, Flynn met many available women. His first date was with the Dean’s Office administrator, whose offer of a home-cooked meal turned out to be limp noodles with broccoli washed down with cheap chardonnay. Most of the conversation centered on her overweight daughter, how the girl would never find herself a husband unless she lost forty pounds. She showed Flynn pictures—a bright-eyed college graduate, curvaceous and lovely. Flynn wondered if he should be dating the girl instead of her mother.

  The second was with the Admissions Director, whom he’d met to discuss his ideas on improving the English major: forming a book club, starting up a visiting writers series, hosting a Halloween party where students and faculty would dress as literary characters. At the end of their meeting she’d told him that a group of employees met every Friday for Happy Hour at a bar called the Dead End. “Oh, and none of us bring our spouses,” she said.

  A few Fridays later, he joined them. They drank pitchers of Yuengling, sang along to loud music, and in the middle of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” the Admissions Director grabbed Flynn by the arm and pulled him outside. After making out by the dumpster for a while, they got into their cars and Flynn followed her to her house. She kept the lights off as they made their way into her bedroom, then lit some candles, turned over a framed photograph on the end table, put on some Indian music, took off her clothes, stripped Flynn of his, swayed in a drunken fertility dance, and mounted him. Flynn, who had hastily put on a condom that instantly deadened all his nerve endings, held on as she pressed in for several orgasms in rapid succession, dramatically throwing back her head each time. In between her third and fourth, Flynn lay diagonally across the bed, his head close to the end table, and as she shifted her hips to bring it all home again, he smelled something acrid and sweet: his hair had caught fire. He interrupted Dramatic Orgasm #4 to smack at his head and peel away flakes of his hair.

  His third date was with an artist. Flynn had gone to the Everhart Museum to check out an exhibit of “Homegrown Art,” and one wall featured tall canvases of dark, sensual nudes conveyed in chalk. Just as he spotted his colleague Joseph in the room with a silk-shirted younger man, the artist herself approached Flynn. She was a graduate student at the University of Scranton, and her skin looked soft under her flimsy dress. As they introduced themselves and talked about her work, she thrust out her pelvis and let her hair fall over one eye.

  The next morning, she called Flynn and told him she was on the front steps of his house, talking with his grandmother.

  “How did you—”

  “I asked around,” she said.

  Flynn ran out the garage door to find Helen berating her for dressing like a harlot. She was wearing a low-cut sun dress with sandals; her toenails were scarlet. She turned from Helen, her face flushed, and told Flynn she had come by to see if he wanted to go for a drive. She seemed on the brink of tears.

  “Hang on,” he said, and he ran down to his room to wash up and put on a
clean shirt. On his way out he grabbed a condom, just in case.

  The artist drove north. It was a mild day, and the sun was out at last. As they passed through woods jammed with old-growth hemlock pines, with gurgling creeks matted by leaves, the artist gasped—“Those trees!”—then pulled over, popped open her trunk, and pulled out an easel.

  An hour later, Flynn had taken a long hike in the woods and a short nap on the leaves, waking up when an orange salamander crawled onto his face. Meanwhile, the artist had produced a haunting portrait of the forest. The canvas was splayed with vertical lines, tall trunks paralleling one another and branches intersecting, dimly backlit and crowding off the edges. The trees looked achingly sad, stripped of strength and violated, yet also resilient. “I can’t give this to you,” she said, “even though it reminds me of you.” Her dress was unbuttoned almost to the waist, her arms and face striped with chalk, her hands maroon. When Flynn slipped his hand onto her rib cage she instantly pulled him down with her onto the bed of leaves, and slid aside the straps of her dress as if he were a baby yearning for her milk. As Flynn reached for the condom in his pocket, he thought, How about that? Helen was right.

  The next day, he went to Joseph’s office and told him he had found the place where he wanted to live. Joseph, the one who had originally emailed him about the room at Helen’s house, apologized for how that had worked out, then took out a map of northeast Pennsylvania and helped Flynn to locate where the artist had taken him, near Tunkhannock Creek. There were patches of green: a state park, and wooded areas interrupted by small towns. “If you don’t mind the complete lack of civility and loathsome turkeys in your backyard,” Joseph said, “then that’s where it’s at, baby.” He recommended a realtor friend at Endless Mountain Realty. “Your kids will love it,” he said.