Off Course

by Michelle Huneven

  “By the way, I haven’t told my parents I’m seeing Jakey yet,” said Cress.

  “They won’t hear a peep from me.”

  A small, late lunch rush was in progress at the lodge. Jakey came out to pour them each a glass of white wine. “You gals set the world straight yet?” He nipped Cress’s neck, went back to the grill.

  A man at the end of the bar stood and walked over. “Is that Sharon Hartley, all grown up?”

  “Cressida,” she said, as an older, rheumy-eyed Reggie Thornton toasted her with his coffee cup. His pompadour had deflated, his white hair sat close to his skull, in perfect waves.

  “Cressida Hartley. I’ll be darned. You up for the weekend, Cressida?”

  “A couple months, actually. And you? Visiting old friends?”

  “Still have my place by the pond,” he said.

  A convicted killer—that made her shy. But Reggie was cheerful and friendly; he asked about her parents, her sister, about the new cabin going up. “I knew Cressida when she was a skinny little sprout about yea high,” he told Julie as he walked behind the bar. He filled his coffee cup with bourbon from the well, then grabbed the wine bottle and topped off their glasses to the brims.

  * * *

  “How do you kill two people driving drunk and still drink?” Cress asked Julie on their way home.

  “He’s not supposed to,” said Julie. “The coffee cup’s so the sheriff and rangers won’t catch him violating parole.”

  Cress herself was drunk. A nasty Chablis-yellow ache pulsed behind her eyes, and all she wanted was a dark room, ice on her face, and a gallon of water. Julie had left her walking stick against the bar, and Cress, noticing, was so grateful not to have its metronomic accompaniment all the way home, she said nothing. She walked quickly, to get there, and she talked, too, to distract herself from her headache. Art, she told Julie, had been her first major, but so damn hard. Then economics had come so easily. Her boyfriend in college was an econ major, and she’d just taken an intro class so they could talk. But the first econ paper she wrote won the department’s yearly essay prize—her boyfriend never forgave her for that. She’d entered his territory and bested him. It broke them up. But who knew she’d had a talent for economic theory? Even before she graduated, she’d had a paper published—when she was still a fine-arts major. Only when she was applying to grad school did her painting professor sit her down. Maybe think twice, he said. Frankly, he—her teacher—didn’t think she had the temperament for life in the art world. (He said temperament, but she knew he meant talent.)

  “If art’s your calling,” Julie said, “it doesn’t matter what anyone says.”

  “I don’t know about calling,” Cress said. “I just liked making it.” She’d applied to Pratt and Cal Arts, anyway, she said, and got into Cal Arts, but without any financial aid. In econ, she got into all four places she’d applied, probably because female applicants were so scarce. Iowa gave her a three-year fellowship. Her boyfriend there, John Bird, was also an economist. But that’s it. No more economists for her. And once she was done with the diss, no more econ either.

  “So you’ll go back to painting?”

  “I don’t know.” For her dissertation, she planned to write about the economics of art, how the work accrues value. She’d posed certain questions, then tried to answer them: for example, what brings more value, a good review or a sold-out show? A major prize or a museum purchase? A museum retrospective or the artist’s death? She’d spent last summer in Chicago talking to gallery owners and museum directors, who were as interested as she was in the answers. The market realities were sobering and could chill any artist’s ardor. “The best thing an artist can do is die,” Cress told Julie. “Nothing raises prices more than death.”

  The death line usually made people laugh, but Julie Garsh had no discernible sense of humor. She pursed her thin lips. Then, panting as she trotted to keep up, she said to Cress pretty much what everyone else did: “Just finish the dissertation. Then you can do whatever you want.”

  * * *

  In the morning, waiflike Franny appeared at the A-frame’s sliding glass doors with a vacuum cleaner. The top of her head didn’t reach the standing bear’s nose smears. “Your mom says I have to clean, ’cause her and your dad’s coming up.”

  “I guess she doesn’t trust my housekeeping.”

  “That’s what she said.” Franny hauled the hose and canister inside.

  Cress didn’t want to lie around reading New Yorkers while Franny worked, so she sat at the card table and took out a file, scrolled a sheet of paper into the Selectric. CHAPTER ONE, she wrote at the top of the page, and under that The Problem of Value in Art. Okay now. Start. Determining the utility of visual art has always been a difficult discussion. Too much, too vague, and she probably shouldn’t begin with a term like “utility,” which means something different in econo-talk than in English—not if she ever wanted to publish this as a popular (as opposed to an academic) book. She yanked out the paper, balled it up, tossed it into the fireplace, and twirled in a fresh sheet. The intrinsic value of art may be incalculable, but the price of art tends to be linked directly to market realities. Nope. Too big a bite. Yank, crumple, and toss. How art accrues value in the marketplace is only subjective at the beginning. Better, more grabbing. But soft, soft. Into the flames!

  “Bingo,” said Franny, who’d been watching from the loft.

  Four

  “Oh Cress. What have you done?”

  In seventeen years, the cabin had filled up. Sylvia Hartley had a reputation, well deserved, for being a gourmet cook—an achievement, given her famously cheap husband—and people bore that in mind when buying her a gift. Her refrain for every too-specialized gewgaw or arcane gadget was We’ll take it to the cabin! In the packed drawers and cupboards of the A-frame’s kitchen—itself just a small corner of the front room—could be found tortoiseshell caviar spoons, a shuddery electric knife, a tortilla press, clay butter molds, a fish poacher, three pedestal cake plates, an ebelskiver skillet, an oven mitt in the shape of a salmon, and linen dish towels from Stratford-upon-Avon and the San Diego Zoo. Crowding the space was an enormous pickling crock holding a decade-old arrangement of dried artichokes, an old-fashioned grocer’s scale swinging from a canted beam, and a slumping stack of place mats on the table that periodically, with no provocation, slid to the floor in a splay of raffia, chintz, and plastic.

  Cress had carried many of these items to the guest room’s closet. She’d also removed someone’s attempt at macramé that sagged on the bathroom door and the faded family photographs on the one stretch of unslanted wall by the fridge, replacing the photos with five small colorful street scenes that Tillie had painted in Tehran.

  Sylvia made Cress bring back the photographs, the grocer’s scale, the macramé. “Cindy Hazzard made that for me,” she said.

  Whoever Cindy Hazzard was.

  “It’s not your house,” her mother said.

  “I know, I know.”

  “And another thing,” Sylvia said. “Your phone bill was through the roof.

  “Through the roof,” she repeated.

  Cress muttered, promising to pay. The problem was, you could call New York late at night and talk for hours for what a ten-minute call to Tillie cost midday.

  * * *

  Cress walked by the lodge to warn Jakey that her parents were up, lest he barrel into the A-frame at midnight. “Saw ’em drive in!” he said, and bustled her into his office for sex on the rug.

  The next day, he waved her down. “Sneak over to my house later.” His hand crept under her gingham shirt, right there on the lodge’s porch.

  After her parents went to bed, she slid open the door, and her mother called her name. “Just getting another log, Mom,” Cress said, and went back inside.

  * * *

  She and her mother peeled vegetables for a stew. “So you know, Mom, I’ve been out a couple times with Jakey.”

  “Jakey? Jakey up here?”

&
nbsp; “The very one.”

  “Oh Cress. He’s way too old.”

  “He’s a lot more fun than most guys my age.”

  Orange ribbons unscrolled from her mother’s carrot. “Be careful, Cress,” she said quietly.

  “Why? What makes you say that?”

  “It’s just … Jakey hurts people without trying.”

  “Like who?” Cress asked. “Who has he hurt?”

  “I don’t know of any one incident,” Sylvia said. “Just stuff I’ve heard.”

  * * *

  Her parents left, and she phoned the lodge. “Free at last!”

  “My kids are coming up,” Jakey said. “Any minute.”

  “Come by after,” said Cress.

  “The oldest will stay,” he said. “She always does.”

  “Will I ever get to meet them?” she said.

  “You already know Kevin.” His youngest, a big, blushing kid, helped out at the lodge; introductions had been hollered across the dining room.

  Cress spent that night by herself. The next night, Jakey came roaring into the A-frame after ten. “I miss you, Hartley, in spite of my damn self.”

  At Family Night she said, “Coming up later?”

  “Worn out. Need to catch up on my sleep.”

  Another night alone. Then he had to get up early—another. Thus they settled into a more workaday routine, found a more reasonable pitch.

  * * *

  She was now driving to Sparkville for Rick once or twice a week. For a load of lumber or pipe, she took his truck; otherwise, she took her own car. Rick paid her thirty dollars a run, and he let her fill up at Jakey’s pump on his tab. “Is he also remunerating you for wear and tear on the Saab?” her father said. “That road is hell on clutches, brakes, and transmissions.”

  No. Rick was not paying for wear and tear, but she would not tell her father that.

  “I’ll check,” she said.

  Rick had three jobs going. A Fresno optician and his wife, Tom and Ondine Streeter, had bought one of Reggie Thornton’s log homes and hired Rick to remodel it. He had also taken over from a bankrupt contractor a six-thousand-square-foot folly owned by a Tulare businessman named Rodinger. The Hartleys’ new cabin would be his first custom home at the Meadows—or anywhere.

  After running Rick’s errands, Cress shopped for Julie (and herself) at Younts supermarket, where local produce was set out in field crates: blushing Bartlett pears, leathery pomegranates, frilly bouquets of chard and kale, late-season melons still dusty from the melon patch.

  On her way back up the hill, she spotted Jakey’s truck at the Hapsaw Lodge and found him in the restaurant eating. The woman across from him was a good ten years his senior—glasses, loose neck, dyed-dark pageboy.

  “Ah, Cress,” he said. “Meet Honor. She owns this joint.”

  Honor gave Cress’s hand a dry, indifferent shake and went back to her steak. Jakey’s hands hovered above his silverware.

  “Well, bye, I guess.” Suddenly embarrassed, Cress scratched the air in a silly little wave.

  “Like any professionals,” Jakey told her later, “lodge owners have a need for collegiality.”

  * * *

  He’d stop by, he said, before going to town on Friday, or afterward if he was pressed for time. When he hadn’t shown up by eight that night, she called the lodge and spoke to his answering machine. “It’s me. You coming up or what? I mean, uh, don’t heat the oven if you’ve got nothing to bake.”

  Half an hour later, he was in her bed. She liked his heft. A chest she could barely reach around. His ruddy skin and strong legs, his readiness to be amused. He was such a large man, big arms, big laugh, big personality. Yet he blushed at compliments and frank sexual suggestions. Cress didn’t push for more than he freely gave. There’d be no point in pushing a man like Jakey, who did all things for the joy in them.

  * * *

  Time opened up all around her, free time, empty time, chasms of time. Time to take stock of the light hour by hour, the syrupy sunrises and blanching noons, the wan starlight on moonless nights. Time to gauge the nip of fall, chart the yellowing of aspen leaves, note the close of fishing season and the first cracks of shotguns aimed at quail and doves. Time to drift about the house to George Jones and Lefty Frizzell—Jakey’s favorites—and to Beethoven’s late quartets and Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations straight through. Time to talk for hours late at night to Tillie, and to read—finally!—faded back issues of The New Yorker. Here in the shortening days, time was vast and all her own; no more lunch shifts at the Dinner Plate, no more spongy white uniforms and orthopedic clompers, or tainting disapproval from moronic male managers.

  Into the yawning hours also came sudden drops and voids, onrushes of anxiety. She was alone at 7,300 feet. The man she thought about slipped in and out of sight. The typewriter, whenever she approached, made her sleepy. In the A-frame’s basement she found her old easel, a Christmas present in high school; she set it up and started sketching in charcoal: rocks and a cluster of spruce. Her powers felt thin in that high air. But they’d felt thin in Pasadena, too.

  Afternoons, she took the same four-mile loop she’d devised as a teenager, tramping overland to the Bauer cabin. The meadows had dried out sufficiently so she could cross them without sinking into slime. She checked the deep channel for trout—Jakey said there were native goldens in there—then followed its oxbows to the log cabin. Even on weekends, she rarely encountered another soul. Once, a man was balanced on the cabin’s porch railing. The owner, she thought, but closer, with a proprietary pang, she recognized one of Rick’s finish carpenters, the older, less friendly of two brothers working at the Rodinger house. His misshapen leather hat gave him the look of a nineteenth-century prospector, so appropriate to the slumping cabin. To avoid him, she veered off the trail and climbed cross-country up a ridge all the way to the saddle. There, the whole Spearmint watershed spread out below her, a vast bowl of pines standing as they had for centuries, a soft wind ruffling their nap, like a hand over velvet. Ah, but the trees’ days were numbered. The president had increased harvest levels, and local men, grateful and defiantly happy for work, had begun clear-cutting. A pale swath of raw stumps and debris piles already encroached from the west.

  * * *

  As she walked, she made a frame with her hands, imposed her own geometry on the landscape, composing scenes of trees and rocks, moving water, bushes and grasses, the interplay of shadows and the soft late-summer light.

  She stuck her nose in bark; Jeffrey pines smelled like vanilla, lodgepoles like retsina.

  Woodpeckers hammered at the trees, their red heads a blur; the whole forest rattled from them; were they the same birds she saw day after day?

  On the fishermen’s path along Spearmint Creek one afternoon, she saw a bush thrashing up ahead, and a deer’s spindly, split-hoofed leg striking the water. Closer, Cress saw the animal full on: a doe, who continued to paw the shallows until, backing up, she drew a curling and flopping trout onto a sandbank. The deer struck until the fish, dredged in sand, grew listless. Pinning it with her cloven toe, then stretching her long neck, the doe closed her mouth over the fat V of the tail and, tugging as if at grass, she bit it off. She chewed fixedly, head low, protecting her prize. More pawing ensued—and still the fish twitched and tried to flop—until the doe pinned it again for a second bite. Blood, and a bright ocher organ flashed.

  The deer’s nonchalance disturbed and thrilled, as did her indifference to suffering. Cress rehearsed descriptions for Jakey, that student of animal behavior. Like a cat with a mouse! She would tell Julie Garsh, too, of the violence and cruelty in her outdoor cathedral. The utter lack of mercy.

  Jakey, behind the grill, saluted her with his spatula. Cress stood at the bar; she assumed he’d finish cooking and come talk to her. Only one table waited for food, a mother and daughter. The grumpy blond waitress delivered their burgers, but Jakey didn’t emerge. Cress feigned interest in the sports section but soon, afraid of bei
ng a pest, she left the lodge and walked home.

  * * *

  “Something is chilling Jakey’s ardor,” she told Tillie.

  “And yours?”

  “That’s what worries me. I used to be the less interested party.”

  “Just hurry up and finish your thingy,” said Tillie. “Number 12 should be open by Thanksgiving. Old Fiona’s moving to the Scripps Retirement Home.”

  * * *

  On supply runs, Cress explored the small, uncharming city of Sparkville. Once a railroad hub for farming, ranching, and logging, the downtown now had the depleted anachronistic ambience of a backwater with its scantly stocked dime store and dowdy private department store, its windowless bars. The handsome brick hotel by the old station had long been lodging for seasonal farmworkers. Off the main drag, Cress found an Italian market that sold backyard vegetables—basil, dandelion greens, cardoons—and a cloudy green local olive oil. In a Mexican grocery, she found purple hominy and chipotle chiles, crusty lumps of piloncillo sugar.

  She shopped at Younts, not only for Julie but also now for Brian Crittenden and Florence Orliss, who each paid her ten dollars per haul. That compensated for wear and tear on the Saab.

  She delivered Sawzall blades and a new sledgehammer to Freddy and River Bob demo-ing the Streeters’ kitchen. Nails and an expensive six-foot level went to the finish carpenters at the Rodinger place, where, if she was lucky, Caleb, the younger, homely brother, answered the door. He always made a joke—Where’s the pizza and Coke? Doughnuts and coffee? And once he said, “Wait, wait. I have a tip for you!” and gave her the perfectly formed pinecone that now served as the centerpiece of her kitchen table. The older brother, Quinn, took the supplies Cress delivered in silence and shut the door as she stood there. At her parents’ jobsite, Brian Crittenden unloaded the Saab’s trunk. Hefting a new router, he whispered, “Between you and me, I have no idea what in hell this is.”

  Cress was surrounded by men. In that respect, living at the Meadows was not unlike grad school in economics.