Off Course

by Michelle Huneven

  Three more women were on their way, Rochelle Boyer and the Ellis sisters, Maddie and Lina. Cressida had not been sure how many were coming, or who. She’d let Tillie do the arranging so as not to run up the phone bill. All the women were friends from high-school art classes. Except for Tillie, Cress hadn’t spoken to any of them since her going-away party in late July. She was a delinquent letter writer, too.

  Edgar set to work frying spices for a lamb curry. Much was made of the snow; Cress found old sleds and saucers in the basement, and they took them right outside the cabin and slid down to the meadows between the trees, trudging back up again and again until the sun dunked behind Shale Mountain. Cress built a fire; they drank wine and waited for the curry.

  Tillie demanded to see all of Cress’s drawings and sketches and, paging through them, said, “Coming along, coming along … Can I have this one?” She stabbed a rock study with her finger.

  “Take it,” said Cress.

  Miriam, a business major, had landed a job in the ad department of City and State, a glossy new monthly with offices in Westwood. “The publisher’s this iconoclast, a journalist with an MBA who calls himself a publisher/editor,” she told them at dinner. “He wants big investigative pieces, but also to make money. So ads and editorial work together. I get to suggest story ideas! Tillie’s applying for a job in the art department. I’m trying to talk Maddie into coming on as an editor, and you should apply too, Cress. They need editors.”

  Cress doubted that her stint as the editor of an obscure university-published economics journal—no ads—would count for much at City and State.

  “No thanks,” said Maddie, who had a master’s in journalism from Berkeley and was now interning at the LA Weekly. “I still believe in a firewall between editorial and publishing. Advertising shouldn’t even talk to editorial.”

  “Doesn’t hurt to throw advertisers a bone now and then,” Miriam said. “Sure helps with ad sales. It’s just for the front of the book: gizmos, fashion, decor. I wrote a fifty-word squib on a vertical chicken roaster—and got an ad!”

  “But readers will think you liked the roaster,” cried Maddie.

  “The roaster’s fantastic! It cooks the chicken upright, so all the skin gets crisp,” said Miriam. “Seriously, Maddie, you know subscriptions and newsstand sales can’t pay for a magazine.”

  “That’s no excuse for sneaking in ads posing as articles.”

  “Look at it this way,” said Miriam. “The guy wants his writers to make a living. And why shouldn’t he make a profit?”

  “Not that kind of profit,” said Maddie. “God, you sound like Milton Friedman. I just saw him on PBS extolling the virtues of sweatshops!”

  Cress kept quiet; her friends were all out there making headway in the wild-and-woolly marketplace. She could join them, once the damn diss was done.

  * * *

  After dinner, they walked to the lodge in the moonlight. Tillie was keen to meet Jakey, but he was still not around. Waiting for the bathroom, Tillie did befriend a pretty thirty-two-year-old veterinary assistant from Encino and brought her over to their table.

  “But she’s a bim!” Cress hissed in Tillie’s ear.

  “I know!” said Tillie. “She came up to spend a week with him—rented a whole cabin! And then he had to go down the hill on family business.”

  “That just means the bull is tending his lower pastures. The poor thing.”

  * * *

  The next day, they sledded and lolled around the A-frame, reading and drawing. Cress had to work a dinner dance at the club, so she sent her friends to eat dinner at the lodge. By the time she came home, the house was dark. She filled the percolator with water. Tillie wandered in, wearing Cress’s robe. “Who’s Quinn?”

  Cress counted six spoons of coffee into the percolator’s filter. Come morning, the first one up could just plug it in. “A carpenter up here. Why?”

  “He called a few minutes ago.”

  “What’d he want?”

  “To talk to you. Is this someone I should know about? Another one of your virile working guys?”

  If Tillie hadn’t taken such a taunting, lascivious tone, Cress might have been more frank. But she wouldn’t sacrifice Quinn for Tillie’s amusement. Best keep that sweet small corner of her life to herself. “He and his brother work up here. Both married, by the way.”

  “Why is he calling so late?”

  Cress put the coffee can back in the cupboard. “People know when I get home from work. Did he want me to check his trailer? Hand me that sponge, would you?”

  “He didn’t say.” Tillie reached into the sink. “But God, what a low, sexy voice. You should make him read you to sleep.”

  * * *

  Breakfast the next morning was complicated by an old waffle iron and a breaker thrown when someone turned on the bathroom wall heater at the same time. Then the women sat around the kitchen table and made monoprints with art supplies Tillie had brought up. They inked glass plates, laid paper over the ink, drew trees, rocks, each other, and peeled off the images. They talked about Jakey, who’d finally shown up—“So adorable! So appealing!” He’d bought them all drinks, then cozied up to the women in turn, and chatted with Edgar for half an hour. “He ignored the poor vet tech for the longest time,” Tillie said. “But he finally made his way over to her.”

  “We’ve unanimously decided,” Miriam said to Cress, “that Don Dare should dump that hick folksinger and get together with you.”

  “He’s so not my type! And Donna’s not a folksinger, actually.”

  “Well, he’s definitely my type,” said Miriam, who was single and looking. “I like Jakey, too. Which makes me think I should widen my sights to include more working-class guys. Carpenters, small businessmen, like that.”

  “Neither Don nor Jakey is exactly working-class,” said Cress.

  Miriam said, “Well you’d hardly call them professionals!”

  * * *

  Cress had the day off, so they drove in two cars to Globe Rock for its view of snow-choked forests and Camel Crags frosted like cupcakes. A fast, furious snowball fight broke out on the big bald pate of the rock, the teams random, this side versus that. Cress stood up to warn everyone again about running too far down the rock—“You could start sliding and never stop!”—and took a ball right in her eye, a big red shock that stopped the game.

  For dinner, Tillie had braised a rump roast all day with ten onions and two cans of beer. Cress made coleslaw and biscuits; after such gamboling in cold fresh air, their hunger was shocking. They stayed in and drank wine and played charades and one by one drifted off to bed. As she had for three nights now, Cress slept downstairs, on the window seat, that unforgiving, narrow little shelf.

  * * *

  After the beds were stripped and the duffels and totes and grocery sacks hauled down to the cars, her friends departed. It was December 31, everyone had a party to get to. Cress herself was scheduled to work at the country club’s New Year’s Eve bash. Her eye, at first faintly blackened from the snowball, grew more colorful by the hour. The morning was bright, the roads clear, the thermometer read sixty-three. Nobody would skid into snowbanks today. Cress waved her friends off without regret. She’d spent her high school years yearning to be with them; she’d moved to Braithway Court to do so. But she could only take so much. The years of childhood exile up here had trained her to solitude after all.

  The world clicked with the sound of water dripping off trees and eaves onto the softening snow.

  “Another perfect day in paradise!” Don Dare called from the new house.

  Cress went upstairs and took a nap—she’d be up late tonight. Jakey woke her with a phone call at two. “Big boulder and mudslide on the highway just below the back entrance,” he said. “Nobody’s getting in or out till Monday, which is as soon as the state can get up here.” It was Thursday.

  Cress phoned Beech Creek, told Dalia about the rock, then walked down to see it. Elephant-gray fine-grained granite with
veins of white quartz, the oblong boulder sat high on a bulging skid of mud: God’s shrug. Cress sketched it from two different angles; the surging shape suggested her grandmother’s old swamp-green Hudson Hornet. When she tried to climb over the slide for another perspective, she sank to her thigh in pebbly mud.

  Her friends had chipped in money to pay for a housekeeper so Cress wouldn’t have to do all the cleaning and laundry. Franny arrived at four-thirty. “Who popped you one?” she said, lightly touching Cress’s eye.

  They made the beds together. “Brian’s stuck down in Sawyer. Donna was the last person to make it up before the rock,” Franny said, “which is good, since she’s singing tonight. DeeDee and the boys are down, so I told Jakey I’d work her shift tonight, although it won’t be many people at the party now, with the rock. Jakey’s doing a six-buck steak for everyone stuck up here for New Year’s.”

  Franny shuffled through the loose stack of monoprints and drawings left behind on the kitchen table—portraits the friends had made of each other, a few snowscapes. Cress pointed out Tillie’s portrait of Edgar. “That’s my favorite. I like her line, how playful it is.”

  Franny looked hard at the drawing, traced the line with her finger.

  * * *

  Strands of yellow crepe paper looped from the beams. Reggie Thornton pinch-hit as bartender. Jakey served forty-some steaks, with black-eyed peas and greens. Cress, Franny, and Donna sat with the carpenters. Donna spoke softly in Cress’s ear: “At the Sawyer Inn, Saturday night, Quinn and Caleb came in with their wives to hear me sing. They were really living it up—cocktails, steaks, more cocktails. Sylvia only had one greyhound and she literally slid under the table.”

  “That’s exactly what Quinn said would happen if she drank.”

  “They kept dragging her up, and she kept slipping down again. It was kind of weird. I mean, why didn’t he take her home?”

  When Donna went onstage, Jakey took her seat. “Dr. Hartley!” He crushed into Cress. “Helluva shiner there! Hey, that friend of yours, Tillie, she’s a live wire: ‘You can’t put one over on me, Jakey Yates, I’ve heard allll about you.’”

  “Oh dear.”

  “I liked her. And all your friends. Nice people. That climatologist, Edgar, the Paki? Interesting guy.”

  The vet tech was sipping a green drink at the bar and giving Cress evil green looks. When Jakey moved on, Cress stood, stretched, and said her good nights. Happy New Year, Happy New Year, everyone! It was ten o’clock.

  * * *

  Cress was home only a few minutes and still fiddling with the fire when she heard drumming on the glass door.

  “What are you doing here?” she said, sliding it open. “Why aren’t you with that nice, pretty animal handler? Seeing how she came up to see you and rented that whole place and all.”

  “She told me she came up to cross-country ski.” Jakey handed Cress a bottle of champagne, shrugged out of his coat.

  “Can we drink this out of plastic?” she said, reading the label. “Not that we have any choice.”

  As she peeled off the lead seal, Jakey gathered her up. “I’m crazy about you, Hartley, you know that,” he said into her neck. “Always will be.”

  “I know, Jakey,” she said. “But…”

  “It’s New Year’s Eve,” he said. “Who wants to be with strangers! Auld lang syne, Hartley!”

  She laughed and relaxed. She too could do what she wanted. She too could really live it up.

  * * *

  The phone rang sometime after midnight, waking her. Jakey rolled over, went back to sleep. Cress padded downstairs, lifted the receiver. “I wanted to hear your voice,” Quinn whispered. “I’m in my mom’s bedroom again. Can’t really talk. We’ll have a happy new year, Cressida, once I get back.”

  Or that’s what she thought he said, or hoped he said, but he was whispering and there was static and she was half asleep.

  * * *

  During the boulder’s siege, the days were sunny and short. Snow melted. Nights bristled with frost. Mornings loosed sprays of diamonds. The clack of water dripping into snow was continuous. Cress worked on a chapter, but mostly she drifted, read about the Black Death, and made herself small bits to eat: cinnamon toast, a sliced apple with cheddar cheese. By Saturday, the snow was mostly gone, and she walked her full loop, the world re-revealed, saturated and darker, spongy underfoot.

  She felt delicately buoyed by her discovery that she preferred, even required, long stretches of her own company. She was pleased, too, that she hadn’t offered her most recent love life to Tillie or the others as a topic of conversation. She’d kept Quinn for herself.

  Monday morning a series of concussions rattled the A-frame’s plate glass. A strand of white smoke spiraled above the trees to the south. Later, on her walk, she visited where the boulder once sat, now a mud-colored stain on the black road, a scattering of fist-sized gray rocks swept off to the shoulder.

  * * *

  The brothers returned on black roads bathed in snowmelt.

  She ran into Caleb at the lodge; he was buying Bisquick. “With the cats away, the mice wreaked havoc,” he said. “What’s with the eye?”

  “Snowball,” said Cress. “Enjoy your holidays?”

  “A lot of eating. Took the kids out to the drags.”

  “The drags?”

  “Drag races,” he said.

  She’d never known anyone who went to drag races. Dubious, she said, “Was that fun?”

  “Had a ball,” he said. “How’s the drawing?”

  “I’ve been sketching a lot of rocks.”

  “I’d like to see your work sometime.”

  “Anytime.” She didn’t ask about Quinn, and Caleb didn’t mention him, either.

  * * *

  Something threw her: a new hat. Dark leather, handmade, stiff: the new version of his old one. She could see now that the hat was something you’d buy at the kind of craft fair that sold quilted Bible covers, wind chimes, and finger puppets. She grieved for the broken-in, chewed-up old model with its coiled brim and distinctive, lopsided silhouette. No need to ask who’d replaced it.

  Snow blew through the door as he came inside. Cress poured bourbon into her mother’s plastic tumblers. He sat beside her on the wicker love seat. The low fire pulsed and flared. “God, it’s been forever,” he said.

  He pulled a wad of gray-and-blue tissue paper from his jacket pocket. “For you.”

  She hadn’t seen this small, perfect donkey in his garage. The mane was finely articulated and tinted dark, the hooves dainty, the eyes shiny and black. She turned it over: two tiny teats. A female. “Hard picking out the right one for you,” he said. “Singling them out, they start getting symbolic. I know you liked the beaver…”

  “But you settled on the ass.”

  “I used black onyx beads for the eyes,” he said.

  “I love it,” she said. They clicked glasses and he put his down. Taking her face in his hands, he examined her eye, now yellowish, with green-and-purple tints. He kissed it, then her mouth. She inhaled his ferny cologne, tasted his finely pebbled tongue, received the brush of his thick trimmed beard. He kissed her for a long time, through the first exuberant swells of emotion to a shining calm. Any minute, Cress thought, they would rise and climb the stairs and shed their clothes. But Quinn kept kissing her, his patience exquisite. In time, her lips grew numb and her desire receded; she opened her eyes and read the faded spines of books on the shelf and watched the long spiderwebs hanging from the rafters; thickened by dust, the strands swung slowly in the updrafts of heat from the stove. And still, he kissed her.

  Each adjustment to their embrace caused the wicker to drily creak—never was a love seat less conducive to lovemaking than this wobbly pine-and-straw scaffold. She shut her eyes again and drifted languidly, daydreamed a blur of yellow meadows, blue snowfields. The fire sputtered; logs crumbled into coals with a sigh, and out of nowhere, it seemed, desire slammed back into her. Her womb twanged, the pain sharp, clarifyin
g, and eye-opening, literally.

  Over Quinn’s shoulder, she saw a snow-dusted figure at the sliding glass door. Bundled, behatted, he’d raised a hand to knock. She shut her eyes and wished the apparition away, to never-have-been. She kissed Quinn with new determination—to distract. When she checked again, the visitor was gone.

  Quinn stood, and led her up the stairs.

  Thirteen

  Snow fell and stayed, and more snow fell on top of that, and more yet. The world quieted, lost detail, shadows turned blue. Cress found skis in the basement, wooden Nordic skis, her parents’ apparently, but hardly used. John Bird had taught her how, and they had skied cross-country over Midwestern fields, in leafless woods. She fit into her mother’s pair and quickly picked up the old rhythms; Quinn, with thick socks, could use her father’s set and, with his unusual sense of balance, he skied gracefully his first time out. For a scant hour and a half of light in the late afternoons they looped in wide slaloms to the meadow, and across the meadows’ open expanses, then followed fire roads. The only other tracks belonged to chipmunks, rabbits, and hopping jays. They met no other skiers until at dusk one day, out toward Camel Crags, they skied in someone else’s grooves and met Jakey and Ondine coming back. Jakey was ruddy from exercise. Ondine, fair and lithe in an ivory snowsuit, glowed.

  Beautiful, lovely, the four said. Perfect time to be out. So quiet.

  Getting cold, though. Whoops! You okay? Falling’s part of the sport.

  * * *

  The brothers hosted no more card games in the trailer. Nor were there poker nights at DeeDee’s.

  Cress saw DeeDee only at the lodge. They were civil but not friendly. And then Cress stopped seeing her at the lodge, too.

  “Hey, where’s DeeDee?” she asked Jakey.

  “Quit on me,” he said. “The boys were missing too much school. Rented her house out to River Bob and Freddy. Went to live with her mom in Visalia. Took a job at the trophy factory.”

  * * *

  Sylvia and Candy, he said, were bringing the kids up Saturday morning to play in the snow. “So you know,” he said. “Arriving Saturday, leaving Sunday.”