Off Course

by Michelle Huneven

  Despite her trepidation, jubilance kept bursting through. He did love her! She’d known it, of course, but hadn’t permitted the words to form. Her own reticence, the stringency with which she’d held herself back, those thick old leather harness straps, had loosened once they came off the mountain, and now had fallen away. She could let herself go—or could no longer hold back. Of course she loved him. Allowed, love rippled retrospectively through their time together like a frisky zephyr, ruffling memories, sweetening and brightening all that had passed between them. She had been so firm and practical, she had built barriers of his faults, never once imagining marriage. Somehow, she’d played it just right. She felt clever, and carefully ecstatic, as if she’d coaxed a bull elk to nuzzle corn from her palm.

  She went back inside Younts and bought the food he liked: pork chops, thick tortillas, jack cheese, eggs, thin breakfast steaks. She’d cook for him again, when the jumbo roommates weren’t hogging the kitchen. Back in the Saab, she bumped over the train tracks on the outskirts of town in the hazy blue dusk. Engaged. Spoken for. Her hand was taken. It was a secret engagement, true. And bound to be a long one. A marriage had to end. Divorce filed for. A year must pass from the date of filing, and the filing itself could be weeks, even months away. She had time, at least, to get used to the idea. Or find a way out.

  Since she was a little girl, she’d wondered whom she would marry, and now, it seemed, she knew. Quinn Morrow—was that even possible? He was not any of the husbands she’d imagined—not a bearish professor, jolly and loquacious, who was also an improbably good dancer. Not an intense, thin intellectual, a philosopher or historian, curly-haired, complicated, and probably Jewish. Not an artist, either, masculine, laconic, and moody—though Quinn was closest to that. A gloomy whittler! A handsome father of two, a skilled outdoorsman. A fine architectural woodworker, smart and agile and sad. Her heart lunged recalling his sadness. She would be his companion, yes.

  The sudden constriction of possibilities also kicked up whiffs of disappointment—but wouldn’t it always? Doesn’t every choice eliminate all others, including some quite appealing? But choosing also spawned a hundred new possibilities: Where would they live? Who would work? Would they stay in the area? Could she bear that? If so, would she even need to finish her dissertation? Would there be babies? Maybe they’d live in the A-frame again—why not move back up tomorrow? Or rather, the day after Annette graduated. When was that? Cress had seen something on the schedule at work, a high-school graduation party later in May.

  She’d missed her turn east and found herself in a dusty neighborhood along the train tracks. Body shops and salvage yards alternated with the occasional old farmhouse. Cress pulled into a dirt driveway to turn around. A hand-lettered sign by the mailbox said, DATSIE PUPPIES FOR SALE. On the porch a large, older woman in a pale yellow housedress rose from her metal chair, perhaps taking Cress for a dog shopper.

  Quinn had no right. He was in no position to ask her. Divorce was just an idea of his, fragile and untested, a pale flower in a pitch-dark cave that might shrivel when brought to light. When he told Sylvia.

  And he’d proposed on the phone. When he was married to someone else.

  She shouldn’t have answered him. She should’ve put him off. Or, changed the subject. Hey! Those buckeyes bloom long on Noah Mountain? She could have been sterner: Now is not the time or place to discuss it. Well, she’d blown it. At the first provocation, all that she’d held in check for months and months had boiled up and out. Impossible now to stuff it all back inside.

  Sylvia, the few times Cress had seen her, had not seemed like a woman at dire odds with her husband. What if she didn’t let him go? Or worse, what if his leaving pushed her over some edge? Guilt sloshed up, a tepid, brackish bath. Better nip the whole thing in the bud, before anyone got hurt.

  Quinn phoned again as Cress was wedging meat packs into Donna’s crammed-to-capacity freezer. He was whispering—his extended family was in the other room. “Maybe don’t tell your parents just yet,” he said. “Let’s wait till things are a little further along before we make any big announcements.”

  Eighteen

  “I’ll just get my degree and teach,” she said. “That will give us a good base income. We can still live up here. I can commute.”

  He said, “I don’t care where we live, so long as we’re together.”

  She was more marvelous than she knew.

  “I’d like a little log cabin, in a meadow,” she said.

  “Can do,” he said. But there were college towns he liked, too. Claremont, in the orange groves up against the mountains would do. Davis—the Sacramento Delta had some appeal. Even New York City, if they lived on Long Island, or the Jersey Shore. She wouldn’t have to take any old job. Or any job at all. He’d support her. That, frankly, was his dream. To give her all she wanted. To take on her well-being as his responsibility. He’d be honored. The economy was picking up. He’d find work. Cabinetry or, if worst came to worst, framing.

  * * *

  Tillie said, “That’s all very romantic and stirring, Cress, especially for you, given your stingy dad. But let’s be practical. You will have to work. Because by the time your guy’s paid his alimony and child support, there won’t be much left for the two of you.”

  “I don’t care about all that,” Cress said. “Any of it.”

  * * *

  Sunday morning, Cress went with Donna to the Sparkville swap meet. In the dusty vacant lot across from Food King, she bought three big boxes of Limoges china, the pattern a simple rectilinear band in gold-on-white porcelain from the last century: platters, soup terrines, coffee and tea pots, plus place settings for twelve, all for sixty dollars—which was still the most she’d spent on any household item in her life. When she held a plate up to the sun, she could see the shadow of her fingers through the china. She imagined the gold rims drawing light on a long pine table within dark log walls. Once she hauled it back to Donna’s, the china seemed presumptuous, ill-timed, and she was too shy to show it to Quinn, who didn’t notice the boxes stacked atop all the other stuff in her room.

  The next week, with Donna at the much larger Fresno swapper, a bearskin sprawled on the hood of a vendor’s Chevy pickup, a large old pale-snouted black bear backed in billiard-green felt. A persistent slice of sunlight had striped one thick paw; otherwise, the fur was thick and shiny, the snarling head intact, the glass eyes a rich brown, the teeth yellowed with varnish, the tongue a genital-pink plaster hump. He—Cress assumed so large a specimen was male—could not have been her former hungry visitor; this skin was clearly old—but it might have been her fellow’s grandpapa. She trembled, knowing she would buy it even before a price was named; this would be her engagement present to Quinn, handed over when he gave her a ring. (Engagement present! The very idea of an engagement present came to her at the exact moment she laid eyes on the bearskin—the term itself must have seeped up osmotically from the stacks of women’s magazines beneath her bed.) The skin, she knew, would make him laugh. It would go, of course, in front of their fireplace. Their hearth. The vendor asked for three hundred dollars and took her check for two. He folded the skin ceremoniously into a tight package, felt side out, which he wrapped in heavy brown paper and tied with multiple loops of hairy twine. Cress and Donna carried it together, heaving it into the Saab’s trunk. On the drive back to Sawyer, remorse set in for gutting her bank account. “Don’t let me be so impulsive,” she told Donna. She left the bundle in the Saab’s trunk, pending its presentation.

  That was the fourth Sunday in May. Annette was graduating on Wednesday.

  * * *

  Beech Creek Country Club counted nine graduating seniors among its member families. The party was set up for a hundred. Tri-tip roasts were grilled on a big drum barbecue wheeled to the ninth hole. Bartenders poured unlimited soft drinks, which the kids fortified in the parking lot. After dinner and a short ceremony, a local rock band launched into “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place,” and the danc
e floor filled.

  Cress watched this, as she did all such celebrations of provincial life, with a mixture of wonder and contempt. Her own high-school graduation had been marked by a long, boring commencement at the Rose Bowl—her mother left to finish dinner before Cress’s name was called—and that night a lady’s Timex in its clear plastic case appeared beside her place mat. The thin brushed-gold band was designed for another kind of girl, the sedate, pretty, jewelry-wearing daughter Sylvia Hartley would have preferred. The tiny watch face with its speck-like numerals was virtually unreadable. Cress feigned pleasure for the gift and never wore it. She noticed the watch was missing her sophomore year, no doubt stolen from her dorm room still twist-tied in its original packaging.

  Dalia came up beside her by the dance floor. “See that big kid with the butch cut?” She nodded to a likely linebacker, a pale, thick teen clearly raised on tube biscuits and grease gravy.

  “Good dancer,” Cress said, for despite his bulk and self-satisfied smirk, the boy moved nimbly, even delicately.

  “See her?” prodded Dalia. His partner was a buoyant, curly-maned girl who pranced and swiveled in patent-leather kitten heels. She made little come-hither motions with her hands, then scram-scram ones; she tossed her masses of hair and tottered away, only to mince backward and collapse laughing in her partner’s arms.

  “Cute,” Cress said.

  “That’s your girl.”

  “Mine?” Then a comic sternness in the girl’s brow recalled a broader, manlier brow, and the bright mischief in her eyes was altogether familiar. Annette. And Cress began to love.

  * * *

  “I told her,” Quinn said in a low rasp.

  Clutching the extension at the end of its spiraling cord in the dim hallway outside of her bedroom, Cress sat on the carpet. “Where are you now?”

  “My mom’s. I’ve moved out. We’re getting divorced.”

  “You okay?”

  “Not so much.”

  “You want me to come up? You want to come down?”

  “You’re sweet. I can’t right now.”

  Cress said, “Sylvia took it hard.”

  “No idea it was coming.” Sylvia knew he’d been unhappy, he said. But not that unhappy. And not unhappy with her.

  “You didn’t tell her about me.”

  “It’s not about you.”

  “Good,” she said.

  It was weird, he said. He’d been so mad at Sylvia for so long, about so much, but now that he’d finally had it out with her, he couldn’t recall what had made him so furious. He had some weird kind of amnesia. Or he was in shock.

  (He shouldn’t be telling me this, Cress thought. But she didn’t stop him. She needed to hear whatever he might say in order to gauge her own position and relative safety.) He knew he wanted out of the marriage; he’d wanted out for months. Years, honestly. But he couldn’t remember why. He was exhausted. His mind and emotions had shut down.

  He didn’t remember that Sylvia bored him? That she’d failed to console him after his father’s terrible death? That twenty years of anxiety and timidity had worn him down until his last tie to her was pity, and even that pity had lost its grip, like old glue that dried and flaked away? Cress would not remind him, of course. It was not her place to remind him.

  He didn’t seem to remember that he loved her, either.

  “I need a few days,” he said. “To take it all in.”

  “Yes, yes.” Cress got to her feet. “Of course you do. Take your time.”

  “We’ll talk. When the coast clears a little.”

  Cress beelined past the large fiancés lounging in the living room. Outside, by the Hapsaw, in the warm humid dusk, she shivered as if cold. A soiled white mist crept upstream. She was frightened to think that she’d caused pain—even if Quinn hadn’t named her. What if Sylvia did something drastic? Cress imagined her sprawled facedown on that shiny, baby-blue bedspread, dark curls fanned over a pillow.

  Cress shuddered and looked around. The ever-trundling Hapsaw was a midsized roil of muddy water with suds along its banks. Crabgrass choked Donna’s lawn, and lawns up and down the riverbanks. Even the towering, white-armed sycamore appeared lopsided and ungainly, devoid of enchantment.

  * * *

  In the morning, he had to see her. It was urgent. He missed her. No, he didn’t need more time to think things through. He was sick of thinking. He needed to see her warm, wide-open face, feel her smooth long fingers on his skin, smell her hair, which always reminded him of sleeping in the grass in the sun. He should be suffering alone, he knew, yes, yes, in exile; spiraling down to some essential truth about himself and his marriage, but he just couldn’t bear to be away from her.

  It was Saturday, and Cress was working the 320-person Franklin–Gillette wedding reception, whose setup started at noon; the meal, toasts, and dancing would last deep into evening; she probably couldn’t meet him till sometime after ten, and only then if Dalia let her off before the very end.

  He’d been drinking when she got to the Staghorn. He looked ashen, walloped, ill. She nosed his neck; his hair felt damp and hot underneath, he’d bathed and perfumed himself for her. His body quaked as she held him. “Nobody is making you do this,” she whispered. “You don’t have to go through with it. I’ll be fine no matter what.” She meant to soothe, to remove pressure; never mind if, for the moment, she exaggerated her own emotional capacities.

  They hurried to Donna’s house, to the tiny close gray room where they could speak only in the lowest whispers. He yanked her clothes off, gasping and determined, and they made love in desperate silence. Yes, it was as always, their great comfort and relief. His color returned, he stroked her face, looked long into her eyes. On the other side of the thin wall, Norma and Ike debated between prime rib and baron of beef for their wedding dinner. Surf and turf—excitement amplified Norma’s voice—was only a dollar twenty more per person. See? On the list? Murmuring, and then, “No, Ike, we need the cobbler. Wedding cake doesn’t count as dessert.”

  * * *

  In the morning Cress was carrying two cups of coffee down the hall when Norma emerged from her room in her white terry-cloth robe. “Morning,” Cress said softly. The robe brushed past, flattening Cress against the wall. Coffee slopped on her bare foot.

  She and Quinn huddled in bed with their mugs, gazing at the blank white closet doors. “I’ll talk to Annette this week,” he said. “She’ll know, of course. She’s home with her mom. I really want her to meet you. Down the line.”

  “In due time,” Cress said.

  “Evan will be the hardest,” said Quinn. “I’ll have to be very careful how I tell him so he doesn’t take it on himself.”

  She touched his hip under the covers. They both felt ill, feverish, here, mid-gauntlet, the numinous months on the mountain behind them, the future a blur. They were together right now, in bed, naked, the coffee strong and delicious: weren’t these the very components of their previous bliss? Would these elements ever again coalesce into happiness?

  * * *

  Cress was grateful, later, for the mindless setting up and taking down of banquets. The waitresses unfolded heavy pipe-legged tables, arranged, clothed, and set them; they hauled out the parquet dance floor in plywood-sized pieces. Because Cress had a “good eye,” Dalia assigned her boxing and skirting duties, which meant she created virginal, linen-wrapped head tables, gift tables, tables for the cake, for champagne-glass pyramids.

  A few weeks of weddings had made the waitresses into experts and brutal, mocking critics. “Not another mauve-and-ice-blue color scheme!” one of them would cry across the hall as they set up. “Not another peach wedding!”

  “Should I ever marry again, my color scheme will be plaid,” declared one waitress. Lisette, the head waitress, claimed polka dots; another waitress gingham. Cress said, “Maybe I’ll have a striped wedding—or make that a leather wedding— No! no! not black leather, you pervs. More like a tanned-hide wedding … Oh shut up, everyone!” They uniform
ly disdained dyed carnations and any silk flowers; Cress alone defended a red rose, pine bough, and pinecone centerpiece. They were ruthless on wedding dresses and anything-but-black on groomsmen. “More powder-blue poufters!” a waitress sang into the break room to announce the arrival of yet another wedding party.

  * * *

  Cress drove home at midnight, her shift drink sweating between her knees in a waxy, twenty-ounce to-go cup. When she awoke, her tiny room was humid and cloyed with the evaporate of undrunk bourbon.

  Between her lunch and evening shifts, Cress sat in the sun in Donna’s backyard. The river had clarified and darkened; the low tones in its juicy passage resonated with the ache in her chest. She’d given up on the semi-porn novel. Her mind clicked and calculated. She was not a cost-effective choice for Quinn. He’d lose daily access to his children, the house in town, not to mention a wife’s beauty and faultless housekeeping. And for what? A broad-faced, homeless All-but-Disser with a bank account in the mid–three figures? (Four hundred and twenty-eight dollars to be exact, thanks to her swap-meet splurges.) Also, Quinn knew she’d lived with boyfriends; he knew—in the vaguest way—that she’d dated Jakey. Having had Sylvia exclusively to himself might mean more to him than he realized. His generation put a premium on that sort of thing, while hers considered virginity and, to some extent, the monogamous impulse itself, a liability.

  * * *

  He phoned her midday as she fed the lady golfers. Dalia let her take the call in her office, for privacy. Annette had been sweet, he said. She, too, had said, Whatever makes you happy, Daddy. Also, If you don’t love Mom anymore, you don’t love her—and I hope you find someone you do.

  “I love you, Cress,” he said. “I wish this part was over.”

  * * *

  Sylvia was the hitch. Sylvia was why this part wasn’t over. Sylvia was suffering. He hadn’t been able to talk to her yet about the next steps: hiring lawyers, dividing accounts. She was weeping all the time, and calling in sick to work. Perhaps she was too timid and fragile to survive on her own.