Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  “Road rash,” he says aloud and laughs, light-headed.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Sam peers at Mike, at a face that is familiar yet somehow strange.

  Damn, his heart again, fast-beating like a fiend; he wishes at the very least that it would just revert to normal rhythm; all of this would be much easier and the relief would be almost narcotic. Can’t he just deal with one bodily malfunction at a time? He feels stupid now, worrying so much about trivial things, about aging, about being too old for guys he’s attracted to, about being too old for Luc. What does it matter now?

  Hadn’t he read somewhere that men younger than twenty-five were still developing, which meant their assessment of risk was evolving, their sense of responsibility, their dependability? But Luc believed Sam was the risk-taker because Sam rode a motorcycle and actually carried around a note in his wallet that spelled out where he lived, that there was a dog that would need to be let out, and whom to call in an emergency. Luc always worried that the news of Sam’s motorcycle wreck would never reach him.

  The speck of the helicopter grows larger in the sky and is soon hovering above him. Sam vaguely wonders how they’re going to dig him out of the snow and put him on a stretcher. Surely they’ll figure it out . . . his breathing is even shallower, his heart still racing crazily, but he’s no longer afraid for some odd reason, sleepy rather, and it seems as though he sleeps with open eyes. A spider’s web of rope is drifting down; attendants in white jumpsuits seem to be floating toward him. Why are they dressed in white, is it some kind of winter pallor? Their hands seem so soft as they tend to him; miraculously they are able to create a trench around him and effortlessly pry him out, and he has a halo of snow around him floating in the air. He’s like some weird, crooked angel who fell into the cirque when he should’ve been flying overhead on some astral plane. The ropes are finally attached to the stretcher and Sam is lifted gently, rocking in the air. He peers up through the deepening shadows, up at the darkening decline of Black Diamond Fall and his last lingering thought is: Mike may never be able to get in touch with Luc, the college boy who broke his best friend’s heart.

  February 11; Norwich, Vermont; 15 degrees, high clouds

  Eleanor Flanders is macerating Arnica montana, chopping the flowers finely, adding a tablespoon of almond oil, and grinding them in an alabaster mortar and pestle. She ladles the mixture into masonry jars, which she seals and assembles in the greenhouse just off the kitchen. There, bathed in warm air circulating from a ceramic heater, the lather will cure for at least four weeks. With this unguent she will treat mountain bikers and skiers and hockey players who seek unconventional therapies for their muscular ailments. Luc’s friends used to tease him by calling her “The Norwich Witch,” but nobody could ever deny her success rate.

  The doorbell rings and she answers with the pestle in her hand. The UPS driver has left a small box covered in barcodes, its return address Clearwater, Florida. Eleanor figures this must be Datura stramonium, native to the Southern states, a highly effective treatment for asthma when you smoke it; and also atropine, an antispasmodic that relaxes the lungs.

  She hears a clattering racket downstairs in her husband’s home office. She cocks a practiced ear and listens. Nothing more. She glances at her watch: four- thirty in the afternoon; she has yet to see him today. The moment Luc left for Carleton, Eleanor and Giles began occupying separate wings of the house. Any feeble attempt to hide their new arrangement was foiled when their son visited in early October of his freshman year and called the charade foolish; both Luc and his sister, Janine, had already figured out that the marriage had foundered.

  Giles is an artist who grew up just outside Montreal. He stopped painting years ago and is now an instructor of studio art at Dartmouth. He hates the university’s politics, its rich-kid-jock mentality, and is always insulted whenever students miss his class in favor of intramural sports. A proud French Canadian, he complains that the university’s so-called racial diversity is token, that it’s a school filled with “tall white boys” and “white professors” who are secretly elitist and homophobic. His most recent rant was aimed at the head of the creative writing program in the English Department, who refused to hire a gay black Cuban novelist (whom he and the other hiring-committee members felt was the strongest candidate) because she claimed she “couldn’t work with the man.” “ . . .which just proves my point once again,” he said to Eleanor, “that many Americans are secretly racist and homophobic.” He then proceeded to get so drunk that he fell asleep in his office—and inadvertently spilled Bourbon on some student drawings.

  Several times a year, usually when the seasons are shifting, Giles caves in to depression: withdrawn and unreachable, he drinks recklessly for weeks on end. Any admiration Eleanor once had for his dedication to teaching, his erudition, and his social conscience has been obliterated by his alcoholism. On one glass of wine, he can be charming, two or three glasses, mean as a snake; however, beyond four, he relaxes into a docile, sometimes even philosophical, lush.

  Giles has expected far too much of his children. Ironically, he always discouraged any creativity, a stance that had little effect on their daughter, who conquered high school and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Carleton with a degree in biology; but was crippling to Luc, who inherited his father’s artistic talents and whose promise in painting and drawing actually intensified after his frightening head injury during a hockey game.

  When Luc’s injury first occurred, he suffered weird temporal daydreams. He claimed that his ability to care deeply about his responsibilities and even other people was somehow being short-circuited. The doctors urged Eleanor and Giles to expose him to intense external stimuli, encouraged them, for example, to take their son to hear the Boston Symphony. When they did, Luc complained that the music in the concert hall took on near physical form and he wanted to jump out of his seat and flee. He found city crowds overwhelming, so they visited small quiet places like the Fogg Museum at Harvard. There, staring at Rossetti’s “Blessed Damozel,” Luc claimed that something having to do with the way the light filigreed through the woman’s golden hair reconnected him to a deep yearning for his family, even for his father, whom he often seemed to despise.

  “I think I’m going to be okay now,” he kept assuring them on the drive back to Vermont. “I feel almost normal.” But Eleanor’s optimism remained guarded until the neurologists did their tests and, while seeming satisfied that Luc’s recovery was progressing, warned that these moments of normality might be only short-term. And they were. Soon disaffection came over Luc again, and he was depressed for months. More susceptible to future head injuries and seizures, he faced off against his doctors who tried to dissuade him from playing any sports, while encouraging him to develop his considerable ability as an artist. But he ignored them. He claimed that drawing and painting now made him feel worse and that playing sports actually distracted him and made him feel better. He took up soccer, considered to be a lot safer than hockey. That he was a smart kid was widely acknowledged, but Luc remained a mediocre student. His stellar soccer skills would barely get him accepted into Carleton, where, as the brother and son and grandson of alums, he’d had an admissions advantage.

  Luc is the more beautiful of her two children, and recognizing this, his sister Janine will often say the quality is wasted on him. As the object of affection of so many girls, all too quickly he grew indifferent toward the ones he dated. And the ones who came to love him, loved him, Eleanor suspects, because of his remoteness. Six-foot-two with those piercing light gray eyes and hair thick and wavy and black—he’s the finest combination of traits from both his father’s family and hers.

  A year after the accident in the hockey rink, at the age of fifteen, Luc shocked all of them by going out one night with some of his older high school buddies and never coming home. Frantic with worry, Eleanor began contacting the parents of his friends until she learned that,
riding around the backseat of a car, he had gone suspiciously quiet and eventually asked to be let out. When his friends resisted, he began screaming until they dropped him off on the side of the road. He ran several hundred yards, stuck his thumb out, and the very next car gave him a ride. His friends didn’t think to follow and get the license plate. They just figured he had somewhere to go.

  After forty-eight hours, they and the police began contacting children’s shelters in the downtown areas of Boston and Portland and Burlington. But there was no word. They endured a dismal, frantic two weeks and then received a phone call from a woman in Connecticut, who explained that Luc had shown up at her family farm and, claiming to be eighteen, asked if they were hiring. He was taken on, given a room, but seemed particularly withdrawn. Suspicious, the woman took it upon herself to search through his things and found a card from the Norwich, Vermont library and was able to track down his parents.

  There was a brief window of time that began last summer when Luc actually seemed happier than he’d ever been, when he’d come home from his seasonal job working on a road crew and spend hours in his room lying on his bed sending and receiving text messages. Eleanor sensed that he’d fallen in love, but when she hinted at this a few times, he claimed there was nobody in his life.

  “Probably a man,” Giles pronounced to her blithely one scorching evening when Luc was out with his friends, and they were sitting on the screened-in porch drinking gin and tonics, trying to stay cool. In the ebbing light beyond them, a copse of silver birch trees had tarnished to the color of ash.

  Eleanor considered this. “Why would you say that? He’s had so many girlfriends.”

  Giles fished the wedge of lime out of his cocktail and looked at her fixedly with his inky dark eyes. “As if the two can’t coexist?”

  “I suppose they can,” she said at last.

  “And if so, if it is a man, that would explain . . . his behavior in his relationships with women.”

  Eleanor found herself doubting her husband’s opinion. She’d always felt that Giles was jealous of Luc, competitive with him and perhaps would be relieved that Luc would at some point stop bringing young girls around, girls who’d make his father feel invisible. She wondered where her son might be at that very moment, tried to imagine him entangled with another man in the same moody light.

  “But wouldn’t he know we’d accept it?” she said at last. “He knows how tight you are with some of your colleagues.”

  “But he never tells us anything about himself,” Giles reminded her.

  “That’s because of the injury. He can’t help that.”

  “He was like this before the injury,” Giles disagreed and then pointed out, “so easy for us to blame anything objectionable he does on the injury. But the fact is now he lives in the world of college sports. It’s the last frontier to accept sexual diversity.”

  “Yes and who encouraged him to live in that world? By discouraging his art?”

  Giles looked miffed by her uncharacteristic aggressive tone. He said, “I did in the beginning, I admit. But not after the accident. After the accident it was up to Luc. He wanted to play soccer.” Giles drained the rest of his drink, and then said, “I discouraged him. Of course I did. Because I failed at it. And I didn’t—I don’t—want him to fail and end up like me.” He obviously knew this would effectively table the discussion.

  Luc’s summer elation turned brackish in the autumn and numb by the winter, and he grew sullen and withdrawn. When he started dating Elizabeth, he seemed to revive. Although she’d met Elizabeth only one time, Eleanor felt drawn to her. But then she heard from Janine that the relationship had ended abruptly. She asked Luc why he couldn’t have told her himself, and with uncharacteristic candor he said, “Elizabeth wanted way too much, Mom. She was really suffering over it. That’s not good for anybody. But I know you liked her.”

  “I hardly knew her,” Eleanor had replied. “But what I knew of her, I did like.”

  Luc went on to say, “When it isn’t equal between two people, the one who cares less never sees the best of the one who cares more . . . Trust me, Mom, my breaking it off was an act of mercy.”

  An act of mercy? This appraisal startled her; he’d spoken like somebody who’d already traveled the arc of several long-term relationships and was now looking back with the precision of hindsight. She’d realized with a great pang of despair that she didn’t know the man her son had become, the man who maybe even knew more about love than she did; she and Giles had married early in their lives.

  It’s just after six o’clock now. Giles still has not emerged from his side of the house, where they have installed a hot plate that he uses when they don’t have dinner together, which is half the time. Eleanor is warming up a lentil casserole that she plans to offer him when the phone rings. He’s calling from his office downstairs.”Can you come to see me, please?” he says, and she can tell immediately that he’s been drinking. She turns down the flame under her casserole, takes the stairs down to Giles’s office and raps on the door.

  “Come on in.”

  The room reeks of Bourbon as she enters. He’s sitting slightly hunched over in his swivel chair, his cloudy black eyes squinting at her, red-rimmed, his body quaking like one of those ceramic sports mascots whose heads rest on springs. He’s six-two, the same height as Luc, and his once impressive mass of muscle has softened, not from his age but from empty calories of alcohol; he has become a lanky man with a beer gut. With a glance at his desk, she can spy a sheaf of what she assumes are student drawings that Giles is grading while in his cups. “Dad’s a functional alcoholic,” Janine has often pronounced. “But as long as he gets his work done, Dartmouth will never get rid of him. He has enough of a name, even though he no longer produces anything of merit.”

  A harsh verdict against any father.

  “What’s going on?” Eleanor asks.

  When Giles speaks, his words are garbled. “I’ve had another warning.”

  “From the Dean?” she fills in quickly.

  “Right.” His expression is pained. “More students . . . complained that I’m harsh. My enrollment has dropped. As you know, if my classes aren’t well attended, they can let me go.”

  She can’t help thinking of the shortfall of money this would bring about; and she has her doubts about whether Giles could even get a job at a private high school like Sharon Academy where the salaries are pitifully low, let alone another university. “Maybe you should think about going back to AA meetings,” she says.

  “I have been going. I went today to the noon meeting in Hanover.”

  Eleanor is puzzled; as far as she knows, he hasn’t left his office, much less told her he’d gone to an AA meeting. Maybe when she was working in the greenhouse, he could have slipped out? She points to his cocktail glass. “But you’re still drinking.”

  “They take you in anyway. At the meetings.”

  Like lost sheep. “Well then, maybe it’s high time to stop.”

  He nods and then announces, “I’m going to get another Antabuse prescription.”

  In the past, Giles sometimes felt compelled to drink even while on the medication, his body flushing with heat, his face turning blotchy red; vertiginous, he’d lose his balance and fall down, once or twice vomiting all over himself. “I would suggest you cut back on your drinking before you go on Antabuse again,” she tells him.

  “Good idea. I will,” he says with sudden childlike enthusiasm.

  Staring at the vessel of her once powerful and domineering and now prematurely aged husband, Eleanor reminds herself how hard it must be for this fifty-five-year-old man to resign himself to the sadness of his failure as a working artist that goes hand in hand with his self-abuse. After all, he’s still somewhat in his prime. She remembers their earlier life when he brimmed with ambition and promise and self-confidence, when he was invited to show his work in Boston a
nd Portland, Maine. He’s staring into space now, dazzled by drinking, so disconcertingly far away, and her only comfort is that once he got beyond his secondary school hijinks, Luc, at college, seemed to have grown wary of alcohol. Obviously she can’t know for sure, but at least in the summertime Luc never comes home inebriated after being out with his buddies. She thinks back on the past summer and nights he told her he was staying out with friends when he was probably staying with this unknown person—perhaps a man who once but perhaps no longer brought him so much happiness.

  February 16; Salt Lake City, Utah; 35 degrees, steady rain

  Waking and sleeping in a hospital bed, his elevated leg wrapped in blue strips of fiberglass, Sam is only vaguely aware of nurses coming and going and asking him what he wants to eat. He is still dreaming of those shadows coming down over Black Diamond Fall and sometimes believes he’s still out there waiting for the arrival of the helicopter. He has no idea of how many days have passed, but it’s early morning now. He sits up in bed and looks out his window, at the white crowns of the Wasatch, a paring of moon slung low in the wakening sky. A bearish, blond-haired male nurse comes into his room to ask, “How you feeling today?”

  Trying to assess, Sam says, “I don’t know. I guess I’m better, I suppose I’m better.”

  The nurse looks concerned. “You’ve been pretty out of it. We think it might be due to the shock you were in when you arrived. Then, of course, there are the pain meds.” After a reflective pause the man asks, “Do you think you feel well enough to talk to somebody?”

  “Talk to somebody?”

  The nurse looks discomfited. “A police detective is here. He’s been waiting to see you.”

  In the midst of his groggy state, Sam’s alarm is muted. “A police detective? Why?”