Shenandoah Summer

by John Muncie

  But when he reached I-66, he began to calm down. She was married. He had known it all along. He backed off the gas and slowed to under sixty-five, a good thing, considering the age of the station wagon and the number of state troopers on patrol. And maybe he hadn’t been fair.

  By the time he passed the Delaplane exit, he was deep into regret. He recalled the time when, on one of their prop-hunting trips, he and Alyssa had stopped by the old Delaplane train depot that had been turned into an antiques store. The owner, a blond woman everybody called Popcorn, let them rummage through a storeroom of newly acquired stuff. Two hours later, Alyssa’s truck was piled with a stack of rusted street signs, a cast-iron playground horse missing one leg, an assortment of bottles, and a bucket of cast-off tiles she’d bought for Nattie’s mosaics.

  Farther east on I-66, every exit seemed to lead to a memory of Alyssa. After Delaplane, Tug passed a sign for Marshall, where they’d once gone to the co-op to buy grain and bug spray. Then came The Plains, the little town where they’d eaten at the Rail Stop restaurant and seen Robert Duvall. He used to own the place and was sitting at a table with two men wearing wraparound sunglasses and a young, dark-haired woman so beautiful Tug pretended he didn’t notice her. “Oh, go ahead and look,” Alyssa had said. “I can barely take my eyes off her either.”

  That was followed by Haymarket, where late one night they’d turned off for gas, two Mountain Dew Slurpees, and an animated debate about which Brady kid was the most irritating.

  As the Gainesville exit receded in his rearview mirror, so had his anger. The frustration remained, but he knew he wasn’t going to do anything stupid like sleep with someone else out of spite or not come back. He couldn’t. He loved her.

  Around Manassas, he decided that an e-mail apology would be a good idea. He started concocting one before he realized he had no idea what her e-mail address was. A call, then. He wasn’t great on the phone. Margaux used to complain that he sounded “like a deer caught in the headlights” when she called. It might have been a mixed metaphor, but it was true. Still, a phone call would have to do. He’d wait a couple of days, let things cool down, then, no matter how frantic the gallery show got, he’d call.

  As Tug composed phone conversations in his mind, Alyssa speared piles of manure and heaved sawdust into a wheelbarrow. She hadn’t planned on stripping the stalls that day, but it felt good to kick something, even if it was just a pitchfork.

  She slammed her foot down on the metal shoulder, digging the tines deep into a crusty layer of sawdust turned red from a horse’s urine. As she lifted a wedge of it, the stinging smell of ammonia rushed up at her. She tossed the chunk into the wheelbarrow, where it lay like a piece of ancient crumbling pottery.

  What a spoiled brat Tug was, Alyssa thought as she attacked more of the red sawdust. A woman says no to him and he throws a tantrum and runs off.

  She continued digging until all that remained was the clean brown floor of tamped earth. Then she tackled the piles of manure in the back of the stall. When the wheelbarrow was heaped to overflowing, she started to roll it out. But she pushed harder than she meant and it toppled over sideways, spilling everything.

  “Shit,” she said, glaring at the mound of manure and dirty sawdust. Then she realized what she had said, and started laughing.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  She righted the wheelbarrow and began to fill it up again. So Tug had acted like a baby—could she blame him? He had every reason to be angry. The fact was, when Darryl came back in three weeks, she would share his bed again. She couldn’t imagine making love to Darryl, but she couldn’t imagine asking for a divorce either. How would she feel if Tug were sleeping with someone else? How would she feel if he were married to someone else?

  She walked to the tack room to get some lime to sprinkle on the stall floor. But she was thinking more about Tug’s words than the job at hand. When she dug the plastic cup into the sack, she shoved her fingers against the caustic white powder.

  “Shit,” she said again, as the lime ate into a cut on her hand. She dropped the cup in the sack and rushed to the hose.

  The next time she reached into the lime bag, she was more careful, but she kept thinking about Tug’s words. Four stalls later, she was still thinking about them.

  CHAPTER 51

  The only thing Alyssa liked better at her Washington, D.C., house was the high-speed Internet connection. Googling at the farm could take hours, literally. Two tin cans and some string would have been more reliable than her phone connection with America Online.

  She sat down at the keyboard at seven-thirty that night. By eight-thirty, she’d located Tug’s e-mail address. It took four searches and two computer crashes before she finally found it on a site for the Martin Oppenheimer Gallery, where Tug had last exhibited.

  “I bought candles in Marshall,” she wrote to junkman@hotmail.com. “Come back before I run out. I miss you.”

  Alyssa had decided to write Tug an e-mail somewhere between piling sawdust into the second stall and stripping the third. She preferred the emotional distance of cyberspace to a phone call. She didn’t exactly want to apologize—after all, he’d been the baby, not her. But his words—“How would you feel if I slept with someone in New York?”—made her realize how hurt he was.

  Visions of Tug making love with another woman kept tumbling around in her mind. But who was she to even think about fidelity? As happy as she’d been the past month, there’d been times she’d felt such acute shame that she wanted to draw a big red A on her forehead as an act of penance.

  Still, she wished she could have gone to New York. Being there with Tug would have been wonderful. The show sounded exciting and she wanted to see his world. But the only way she’d be traveling to New York tonight would be through cyberspace.

  She typed the words “Clean Up Your Room” into the Google box. Five minutes later, the first thirty responses of more than 2.2 million appeared. She’d forgotten to narrow the search. What was the last name of Tug’s friend? She searched her mind, but her connection was even slower than Google’s. Nothing came up. So she typed “Palifax” next to “Clean Up Your Room” and chewed at her top lip and tapped the table, waiting for the response.

  This time she got only one result. It was a new site; it hadn’t been there that night she’d first Googled Tug’s name. She clicked on it and eventually it came, unfolding slowly to a black screen with miniscule white letters that read “The Scott Ungstead Gallery.” The black dissolved to a white screen with text boxes about upcoming shows. She clicked on “Clean Up Your Room” and waited. Finally a picture started to appear. It was of Tug’s friend. Now she remembered: Joel Feinblom.

  She watched his face begin to fill the screen, starting at the top and working down, from curly brown hair to a high forehead, to thick eyebrows, to a straight but prominent nose that looked like something stamped on a Greek coin, then to thin lips in a half-smile, chin and neck. A clip from his video work followed—a ripening banana, its skin turning from green to yellow to speckled black to black—then a statement about the idea behind “Clean Up Your Room,” explaining that it was a collaborative effort featuring the following artists.

  Tug’s picture came next. It was a sophisticated, moody photo. Only half of his face was lighted, though the photographer had managed to illuminate the eye on the shadowed side. It made Tug seem distant, cool. Below his photo, a picture of his artwork began to materialize. Unlike the portrait, it was a simple snapshot of what looked to be a garish basketful of dirty laundry.

  Curious about the other artists in the show, Alyssa let the page unfold completely. Along with photos of their work, some artists had included blurbs from gallery press releases and critical commentaries. The artworks were so silly or whimsical or wacky and the blurbs so lugubrious that at first Alyssa thought it was a joke, additional hijinks from the “Clean Up Your Room” team.

  But as she clicked onto a second page and read more, she realized the comments were meant to be
taken seriously. A series of dime-store photos of a severe-looking woman wearing an assortment of baseball caps was “a meditative observation of herself because the body is a source of knowledge and the union of the abstract and the solid.” A sculptural collage of dried caterpillars, barnacles, a stuffed snake with a rat in its throat, and two of the artist’s front teeth was hailed by an art critic as “the unironic observation of an optimistic smile that degrades into a painful grimace of uncontrollable salivation.”

  She found it nearly impossible to picture Tug in this pseudo-sophisticated, art-babble world. Torn between amusement and horror, she read through the site, shaking her head at the pretentious and impenetrable prose.

  As page three unfolded, the photo of a woman artist emerged line by line. Its lighting contrasts were similar to Tug’s, as if the portrait had been taken at the same photo session. The woman had long glossy black hair and exotic features; her mouth was full and sensual, her eyes half-lidded. She looked like a Hollywood casting agent’s idea of a gypsy. She was startlingly beautiful.

  Below her picture was a photo of one of her works, an intricate painting in serious, somber colors, and another inane blurb. But Alyssa never got that far. She stopped at the artist’s name: Margaux Cuberta.

  Tug’s girlfriend. The woman he’d described as “nothing special,” someone who looked like anyone else. This was the woman he needed to take a few steps back from, to “see how we felt when I got back.” And now he was back.

  She hadn’t felt this kind of jealousy in more than twenty years. She’d forgotten this flip side of being in love. She stared at the picture. All she could think of were his parting words. “How would you feel if I slept with someone in New York. That would be fair, wouldn’t it?”

  CHAPTER 52

  Alyssa was on the phone with Roz when she heard a knock on the door. Roz usually called in the evening, but her news couldn’t wait seven hours. Her cabinet detail was being used in the $4 million, 12,000-square-foot summer house her uncle was designing for the pop novelist James Brighton.

  “Just think, every time James Brighton opens his kitchen cabinet, he’ll be looking at my work!” Roz practically shrieked. “And, oh my God, Uncle Ron says Architectural Digest wants first dibs on the house when it’s finished! My cabinets in Architectural Digest! Oh my God!”

  “I’m so proud of you, sweetie,” Alyssa said as she walked to the door and saw Abbi, Marius, and Nattie standing there. She motioned them inside as Roz chattered away. Alyssa loved to hear Roz talk. The words hardly mattered, just the sound of her voice was enough. As the three guests plunked down on the couch, Alyssa nodded and squeezed in “Uh-huh” and “That’s great” whenever there was a break in the sentences, which wasn’t often. For the next few minutes, Roz described the rest of James Brighton’s house in such technical detail that Alyssa was both overwhelmed by her daughter’s knowledge and saddened by her maturity. There was no denying that her little girl was no longer a little girl.

  “Hi, guys. That was Roz,” said Alyssa when she hung up. “What’s going on?”

  “We came to rescue you,” Marius said.

  “From what?” Alyssa said.

  Nattie glanced at one of Tug’s horse drawings taped to the kitchen wall and wanted to say “loneliness,” but Abbi had made her promise to keep her mouth shut about Tug, even though the romance and Tug’s trip to New York were hot topics at Limespring.

  Instead she said, “Boredom. We’re going crazy over at Limespring. It’s too peaceful. We need drama. We’re going for a hike. If we’re lucky we’ll find a rattlesnake.”

  “More likely a copperhead,” said Alyssa.

  “Rattlesnake, copperhead, whatever. We need a diversion,” said Nattie. She stared ostentatiously at the drawing and added, “Don’t you?”

  Abbi shot Nattie a poisonous look. “Come on Liss, join us. We’ve haven’t seen you in ages. Besides, we don’t know the trails, even though Marius says he does. If we listen to him, they’ll have to send the bloodhounds for us.”

  Alyssa thought about all the mindless chores she was supposed to do that day and all the time it would give her to think about Tug. She’d been obsessing over Margaux Cuberta and the fact that Tug hadn’t responded to her e-mail yet. She’d sent it two days before. Nattie wasn’t the only one who needed a diversion. “Count me in,” she said.

  She started to put on her hiking boots. “Wait, I’ve got a better idea. Let’s take the horses up Mount Buck instead of a walk. One of the refugees is going to his new home tomorrow and I’d love him to get one last trail ride in. The other horses could use some work, too. What do you say?”

  “That’s a lot more dramatic than a walk,” said Marius. “I’m game.”

  Abbi and Nattie agreed, and soon the four were riding up Mount Buck, retracing the path Alyssa had taken Tug on the raspberry walk, the same path the real estate agent’s car had started up so many years before.

  Alyssa unlatched the newly oiled gate and the horses followed through. On the other side, the trail was narrow and overgrown from the heavy spring rain. But a few hundred yards on, it opened up wide enough for two horses to walk side by side.

  Alyssa found herself next to Marius. She was riding Theo, the smallest horse in the bunch. But he had a big, energetic walk, and the only horse that could keep up with him was Poli, the huge gray gelding. Marius was riding him.

  When Marius began talking about world climate and the desert-ification of sub-Saharan Africa, Alyssa decided she didn’t need to be that diverted. On the pretext of checking out the other riders, she held Theo up and pulled alongside Abbi, hoping for some news of Tug.

  After polite questions about the progress of Abbi’s book, she asked innocently, “Is Tug back from New York yet?”

  Abbi squinted suspiciously. “Didn’t he tell you how long he was going to be gone?”

  “Not really,” Alyssa said in a blithe tone. “Just that it might take a few days or more, depending on how fast things went. That show he’s helping put together sounded, well . . . inventive.”

  Abbi rolled her eyes. “Inventive? How about preposterous? But that’s Joel for you. You should see some of his so-called video art.”

  “I did,” said Alyssa. “I saw a clip of his stuff the other night when I was surfing the Web. It showed a banana ripening and rotting.”

  Abbi groaned. “Typical Joel.” She glanced over at her riding partner. “What site was it on?”

  “Oh, I can’t remember, some site about the show. They had a list of the artists involved. There’re so many of them, it’s like a herd.” Alyssa hesitated, then asked, “Do you know them? Are they all friends of Tug’s from Pratt?”

  “Well, Joel is,” said Abbi. “And the guy who made a skateboard out of chitlins—he was once Joel’s roommate at Pratt. I don’t know about the others.”

  “Oh yeah, the chitlin skateboard, how could I forget,” Alyssa said. “Well, what about those intense mandala paintings? They’re pretty riveting, know anything about that artist?”

  Abbi ducked under some tree branches before she replied. She knew exactly who Alyssa was asking about and figured that Alyssa had seen a photo of Margaux on the same site. She wondered how much Alyssa knew about Tug’s almost-former girlfriend. Maybe just seeing the photo was all she needed to know.

  “You mean Margaux Cuberta?” Abbi said.

  “I don’t remember her name exactly, but that sounds close. Know her?”

  “Not well,” Abbi lied. “I’ve met her a couple of times, but that’s it.”

  “Is she one of Joel’s friends from Pratt?”

  “I don’t think so,” Abbi said, trying to sound neutral.

  “There’s a picture of her on the site,” said Alyssa, finally getting to the point. “She gorgeous. What’s she like?”

  “Lethal.”

  Alyssa was about to ask what that meant, when they came up to Nattie and Marius, who’d stopped at the crest of the hill. Below them, the trail descended for a short way and
then opened to a wide meadow that bordered a large pond.

  “Beautiful, huh?” said Alyssa. “That’s Cove Lake down there. It was supposed to be the centerpiece for some fancy vacation home development. But it got tied up in a nasty divorce, then sold to a former CIA spook who unloaded it to the Nature Conservancy. It’s a long story, but the upshot is this.” Alyssa waved her arm in front of her. “My own private Lake Placid. I’m usually the only one up here. Sometimes the kids come up on their ATVs, but I can’t really complain too much, they cut these trails. And they pretty much stay on the south side where the trails are bumpier. Let’s go down to the lake to give the horses something to drink.”

  Marius and Nattie rode ahead while Alyssa and Abbi followed. When the others were out of earshot, Alyssa resurrected the Margaux conversation. “So,” she said, “you were saying ‘lethal.’ That’s an odd way to describe someone.”

  “Well, she’s tall, thin, gorgeous, smart, brooding, and completely devoid of a sense of humor,” said Abbi. “And she eats men for breakfast. They love it. They all want to crack the mystery of Margaux.”

  That stopped the conversation cold. They continued down toward the lake in silence, Alyssa mulling over the words “lethal” and “thin,” until Abbi leaned over and tapped her shoulder.

  “Liss?” she said. “You hear what I hear?”

  It was the whine of an engine. The ATVs weren’t on the south side of Mount Buck this time.

  The sound grew louder and Alyssa began to worry. Theo was starting to jig. Up ahead, she could see Poli’s tail swishing back and forth—a sign of agitation. She wasn’t concerned about Abbi, who was riding Roy. As a thoroughbred, he was an aberration; you could light a stick of dynamite next to him and he wouldn’t flinch. Nattie would be safe, too. She was on Lane, a twenty-three-year-old gelding who could still be a little fractious. But Nattie was an experienced rider and could handle most things.