The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  Claude’s wife did not appear until after dinner when I started making excuses about having to leave. Then Claude disappeared for a few minutes, and when he returned he had a young woman in tow. Given the circumstances, I was surprised by my reaction to Claude’s wife. If ever anybody deserved to be cut some slack, granted a fistful of allowances, Lisa Schwartz certainly did. Here she was, clearly in the advanced stages of pregnancy, stuck in a close, shabby, sweltering apartment, with her husband’s mother for company, and with a husband whose prospects for improving their situation were, realistically, slim. And yet, I took an instant and extraordinarily intense dislike to her. So powerfully negative was my first impression that I was at a loss to in any way account for it or even, I fear, to conceal it.

  The young woman Claude had married was short, with dark hair and skin. Her center of gravity seemed actually below her sizable hips. Perhaps in deference to the heat, she was wearing a light jumper that was designed to be worn with a shirt underneath. She was not wearing one though, and the deep arm holes revealed the sides of her moist, swollen, purplish breasts, along with tufts of matted black hair. Every detail of her perfectly dreadful appearance, it seemed to me, was a conscious and pointed indictment of the smiling husband at her side. I had all I could do to shake her hand when it was offered.

  “Lisa,” I said, deciding on levity. “For some reason I half expected your name to be Claudia.”

  “Why?” the girl said, her dark eyebrows joining when she frowned.

  “I don’t know,” I said, regretting the attempt immediately.

  “There any pizza left,” she asked her mother-in-law. “I don’t feel so shitty now.”

  I did though, and when Claude walked with me down the narrow stairs and out into the street, I sat down on the porch steps, still tasting the cherry Kool-Aid. Claude joined me. The sun was down behind the houses now, but it was still light and would be for another hour. Some grubby kids were playing kickball up the block, kicking uphill so the ball would come back to them if it didn’t get stuck under curb-parked cars. It was still hot and muggy, but a tremendous relief from the deadness of the Schwartz flat. I ran my fingers through my hair and said, “Jesus, Claude,” before I could stop myself. Strangely, he didn’t seem to take the least offense, attributing my remark, perhaps, to the sweltering heat.

  For the first time in a long while I felt rotten about not having any money. If I’d had a spare five hundred, I’d have written Claude a check right there, though I don’t know what good it would have done them. It was an unholy trinity they made and I doubted all the money in the world would have made much difference, but it would have been worthwhile to introduce an air conditioner into their flat, if only to dry the glistening perspiration from Lisa Schwartz’s purple breasts.

  Clearly, though, I was more upset about my friend’s circumstances than Claude himself, who just grinned at me and said, “Life, huh?” as if his own was sufficiently awful to be wonderfully interesting. I think it was the first thing he’d said all evening, and it pretty much killed further discussion.

  After shaking hands, I left him there on the steps and pulled my father’s convertible away from the curb slowly, did a U-turn and interrupted the game of kickball. I was in a hell of a mood and when one of the kids made a wise-ass remark as I crept up through their center field, I think, if I hadn’t caught a glimpse of Claude in the rear view, I’d have gotten out and taken great pleasure in bloodying the little shit’s nose. Even when I was safely out of the horrible neighborhood, my murderous mood refused to dissipate, so I drove out of town to a spot where the old two-lane blacktop ran straight and true for several hundred yards. I stopped there for a second, listening to the chorus of insects brought to life by the setting sun and the stillness of the air. Then I hit the accelerator hard and felt a rush of air as the Cadillac strained forward. I kept my foot right on the floor, burning toward a dark spot on the horizon where the two lanes merged in a constant, ever receding fixed point, all speed, all focus, all illusion.

  On the way back to town I had to pull over. The convertible had done what I asked, but it was thirsty now. It took three quarts of oil before anything registered on the dipstick.

  36

  By midsummer Tria Ward and I had become lovers.

  Proximity was partly responsible. I visited the Ward house several nights a week to work on The History of Mohawk County, and to my surprise, Mrs. Ward left me alone in the den she’d set up as a shrine to her father. I told her I’d need a large table and a typewriter, and these appeared the next night, the recliner having been moved out to create space. There were limits to her trust, of course, and when I told Mrs. Ward that I’d need to make a copy of the manuscript, she insisted on doing that herself, fussing terribly about the necessity of laying the individual pages flat on the surface of the photocopy machine. She feared cracking the pristine leather binding. She got over it, though, and was very pleased to discover that I no longer needed to consult the original typescript. This she returned to its hallowed place on the mantel, where it stayed for about a week, and where her nervous glance would locate it as soon as she entered the room, as if she expected it to speak to her in her father’s recollected tones. Then one day the book was gone and Mrs. Ward explained that she’d begun to be concerned for its safety in the event of fire or burglary and had placed it in a safety deposit box in the bank. That burglary was a seriously considered scenario should have alerted me to the dangerous fantasies that Tria’s mother was indulging concerning her father’s tome, but I didn’t and wouldn’t for another six weeks, and by then it would be too late.

  More embarrassing to relate is the fact that I myself began to indulge a fantasy or two concerning The History of Mohawk County. Originally, I had intended to follow Tria’s advice by reading the manuscript, telling Tria’s mother that I thought it quite wonderful, but that local histories had seldom generated any interest outside their locales, and that in any case, I knew nothing about how she should go about getting it published. I’d be happy to write a letter on her behalf to a local or university press, but beyond that.…

  This was the plan, and I no doubt should have stuck to it. But when I began to study the manuscript, I could not help but engage in the theoretical problem posed by its condition. The book was as dry and lifeless as only the worst history can be, but its most pressing problems were stylistic. The writing, though mechanically sound, was stiff, awkward, dull, repetitious, obscure. There were other problems too; the book was not truly history, at least in the best sense, because it arrived at no conclusions and lacked unity of vision. It was nothing more than a compilation of disparate facts. Here’s how the Iroquois stitched their moccasins. At the very least, the book needed a long introductory or concluding essay to tie together the myriad threads the author had not seen fit to weave, and to suggest what possible significance such information might have.

  But it seemed to me that The History of Mohawk County might be rendered readable, perhaps even marginally interesting. And I thought it might be fun to try. Working in the Ward library, so small and dark and cool, reminded me of my wonderful mornings in the Mohawk Free Library during the two years I’d lived with my father. There I had read helter-skelter, allowing the wide world to open up to me at random. The sense of wonder I felt there had been all but stifled by my subsequent education, and the huge, well-lit stacks, adjacent to sterile, modern university reading rooms had proven a poor substitute for my crooked little alcove in the town library. And too, after listening all day to the assorted bullshitters and outright liars who frequented Mike’s Place, I was ready for an evening of quiet, cerebral pursuit, if only I could convince myself of the worthiness of the project.

  At first, Tria was all for sticking to our original plan. She was pretty sure I had no legitimate business futzing around with her grandfather’s manuscript. But when I asked her to give me a week she reluctantly agreed, and I went to work in earnest. Each night I carefully reread about ten pages of typescript,
then went back and edited five of them on the theory that I’d always be far enough ahead to catch significant repetitions of style and substance and be able to reorganize details where needed. Then I retyped the edited pages and made further cosmetic revisions. I was at best a mediocre typist though, and that slowed my progress, until Tria, who typed like the wind, volunteered to do the edited text while I worked in pencil on the copy of the typescript.

  We were a strange pair. Most evenings she’d join me about forty-five minutes into my labors so I’d have something to give her, and then we’d be together in that small room, so close that I could smell her perfume, neither of us uttering a word. Sometimes, I’d be conscious that she had stopped typing, and when I looked up she’d be studying me with an expression that was more suggestive of perplexity and suspicion than the affection I would have preferred. And she always looked quickly away, before I could smile, as if she were conscious of having betrayed her innermost thoughts.

  Paradoxically, even though I doubted that Tria Ward felt much attraction, I began to be uncharacteristically certain that before long she would extend me the invitation. Such arrogance, I hasten to add, was far from customary. In my relations with other young women to this point in my life, I had always been rather pessimistic about my prospects, a circumstance born of experience. I’d been told that I struck most girls as gloomy, and at the university one honest sorority girl I had badgered about going out said that she had nothing against me personally, except that when she went out with a guy, like, she preferred to have a good time, you know? I knew. Perhaps I was confident about Tria because I was beginning to suspect that she was not the sort of girl who preferred to have a good time.

  Once we entered the library, Mrs. Ward left us so thoroughly alone that I began to suspect the older woman’s motives. An early riser, she retired, or claimed to, shortly after nine o’clock, and once her bedroom door closed softly behind her, it never opened again, almost as if she were observing the conditions of a contract. She even announced her retirement each evening by knocking quietly on the door of the library and advising us not to work too hard or too late. Each night Tria would say, “I love you, Mother,” to which Mrs. Ward would reply, “And I you, Dear,” all of this rendered even more bizarre by the fact that the library door remained closed, their protestations of affection thus required to penetrate wood.

  One late July evening, after we’d been working together for several weeks, I couldn’t get in gear. I’d been struggling with the same passage for over half an hour under flickering lights. A dry electrical storm was approaching and we could hear the wind coming up outside, even though the library was windowless. Mrs. Ward had already retired, and when I handed Tria the still flawed page I’d been working on, I pretended to begin another, but watched her type instead. She carried herself the same way she had when she was fourteen and I’d fallen in love with her, as if she hadn’t revised her opinion of herself significantly in the intervening decade, a notion that I found quite charming, I don’t remember why. She seemed to be keeping something at bay, and the result was beautiful, mildly disconcerting only if one recalled the photographs of her mother, who appeared to have done the same thing. I couldn’t help wondering if, like Mrs. Ward, Tria would be transformed, almost overnight, from a young woman to an old one.

  From where I sat that evening, the question was academic. Much more to the point was the smell of her perfume in the close room, the extraordinarily pale white skin of her throat, the enticing silhouette created by the table lamp which backlit the loose, peasant-style Mexican blouse she was wearing. Then the lights went out entirely, and along with them the hum of the electric typewriter.

  “Great,” I heard her mutter in the dark, then, “where are you?”

  “Right here,” I said, not having moved.

  “I’ve always hated the dark.”

  I found her by smell and took her hand. “Let’s go out on the patio and watch the storm,” I suggested.

  “Why?”

  “No reason,” I admitted.

  “Mother has candles somewhere.”

  “To hell with them,” I said.

  The rest of the house was not so dark. Each of the long picture windows of the living room let in enough gray light for us to locate the sliding glass door that led out onto the patio. Heat lightning glowed yellow and orange in the night sky, each charge powerful enough to illuminate one quadrant of low clouds.

  “It’s just us,” Tria said, pointing to the other side of the highway below where there were still lights from streetlamps and houses.

  “What was it like to grow up here?” I said. I was still holding her cool hand, grateful that she had made no effort to withdraw it.

  “What do you mean?”

  I could feel her studying me and felt the strangeness of my own question. “I don’t know exactly what I mean,” I admitted. “Being up here, above it all, I guess. Having money, in a place like Mohawk.”

  When she said nothing, I decided to take a chance, and pointed to a dark place in what was the uppermost reaches of Myrtle Park. “I used to wonder about this house when I was a kid. You can see it from up there in the park. I thought of it as the white jewel house because of the way the sun reflected off it. I wondered what sort of people lived here, what they might be like. I must have been about ten.”

  “It wasn’t anything like you imagined,” she said slowly, as if choosing her words with care. “Like you imagine.”

  She pressured my hand lightly. It might have been a signal to let go, or an invitation. I decided it meant the latter and drew her to me. She neither returned my kiss nor drew away.

  “And you’ve wanted to do that since you were ten?”

  “I didn’t know you then.”

  “But you were already in love with the house.”

  The possibility that this might be true stopped me dead, and the hot wind rattled the patio furniture urgently. For the first time I smelled rain. “Maybe we should go back in,” I admitted. “We may be in for it.”

  “No,” she said with surprising conviction. “It’s not going to rain. The wind is going to howl and howl and nothing is going to come of it.”

  There seemed to me another invitation somewhere in this, and I was right, because this time she kissed me back, allowed herself to melt toward me, and we stayed there under the heat lightning until the low, fast-moving clouds that came at us from behind the park were blown over our heads toward the southeast and the invisible black band of trees that marked the river.

  I dozed, for an hour perhaps, and awakened to soft drumming on the roof. Or maybe it was Tria stirring that had awakened me. I could tell that she was awake now and that she may have been since we made love. She lay with her back to me facing the window, its blinds three quarters drawn. When I drew her toward me at the waist, she turned and burrowed into me as if she couldn’t get close or warm enough. It took me a minute to realize that she was crying. I let her, not saying anything for quite a while, just stroking her hair.

  When she finally stopped, I said, “I guess this wasn’t such a hot idea.”

  “It’s … not … you,” she whispered. “Please believe that. It’s just …”

  “I know,” I told her, though I hadn’t the slightest idea what it was. I was just glad it wasn’t me.

  “It’s strange to be a woman in the same room where you were a child,” she said, after she’d had a chance to think. “My father used to come in here and tuck me in and say that someday there’d be boys in my life, and I’d say no, never—”

  “I liked your father,” I told her.

  She wiped her eyes and raised up on one elbow, charmingly, breathtakingly immodest. “Really? Why?”

  I had to think about it. “He was different,” I said finally. “I didn’t know anyone like him. I was pretty impressed.”

  “And your own father?”

  “He’s different too,” I said.

  “You love him?”

  “Sure,” I said. �
�I mean yes, very much. I’m trying to decide if he has any feelings for me, though.”

  “I bet he does.”

  “Maybe,” I admitted. “He gets along so well without me that I can never be sure. I don’t think he’s ever had a bad night worrying about me, for instance.”

  “I wish I could remember my father better,” Tria said. “According to my mother, he was an empty man. All charm and style and looks and nothing inside.”

  “You should talk to my father about him someday. They were together a lot in the war. Anyway,” I said, “I doubt he was empty. There was something that kept those guys going, the ones who made it all the way to Berlin.”

  “Sometimes,” Tria said, rolling over onto her back again and staring up at the ceiling, “I think that Mother is right about him being empty because I feel so empty myself.” She looked over at me in the semidark with the same scared look she’d had as a girl learning to drive. “Do you ever feel like you’re nobody at all?”