Off Course

by Michelle Huneven

  * * *

  He carried in her bag and washed his hands at her sink. He refused coffee, beer, and whiskey. There were things he needed to do at his mom’s, he said, before the week started. He couldn’t stay the night. He kissed her lightly in the kitchen, touched the rug burn on her arm. She never clung to him when he left—he would’ve hated nothing more—but today she wanted to grab on, pull him from whatever rabbit hole he’d tumbled down. She walked him outside. She’d already turned back toward her house when his truck’s engine caught. A dark vein branched through her vision, like lightning, only black.

  * * *

  She drove to Sparkville for supplies on Monday, and was home by early afternoon. She cut up beef and browned it, added onions with cumin and chipotle peppers. The beef toughened and, after an hour, grew tender. The house smelled wonderfully of smoke and meat. He didn’t come. She wasn’t surprised. She ladled a bowl for herself but had to put it aside untouched.

  She sat at her desk and read the notes for her second column. She started writing and worked until she needed to consult a book stored in a box in the barn. She went out with a flashlight, and when she shone the beam into the box, there was a papery rasp, a dark scurry: a small snake sprang out, a squiggle in midair, then disappeared, leaving its shadow. She recoiled, and understood: that shadow was skin. He’d jumped out of his skin.

  She laughed at her shivering self, and wished that Quinn was there to see. Everything she saw, she stored for him.

  Twenty-Three

  In the week before she saw him again, they all moved to Noah Mountain. Quinn, Sylvia, and Evan. The Sparkville house was up for rent.

  “Had to do it,” Quinn said. “Had to give it a real shot. I owe her that.”

  “Why will this time be any different?” said Cress.

  “I have to try. As many times as it takes to give it a real go. See if we can get along. Or I can’t live with myself.”

  “Haven’t you tried that already, several times?”

  His green eyes were dull and jumpy. “I could never give you up before.”

  “And now you can?”

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  “Get out,” she said.

  It was eleven-something, not even noon. He left a cup of coffee untouched on her kitchen table, and his fly-tying vise was still clamped to the corner.

  She emptied his cup in the sink. As his truck trundled down her driveway, she poured herself half a tumbler of bourbon—from the bottle he’d bought in Glendale—and took it outside to the porch facing the river, where she sat in a chair and waited for the pain to start.

  * * *

  In the mornings, she had a moment of pure bright emptiness before the truth broke over her again: Quinn and his wife now lived up the road in a double-wide aluminum home.

  On the days she didn’t work, she stayed in bed, drifting and periodically nosing her sheets for any scent of him. Food didn’t interest her. She tried to take her morning walks but never made it down the driveway before she had to turn around and go back to bed.

  It was a dry, hot summer. The hills crisped to the color of lions. The high whine of insects bore steadily through the air. The river, low this year, receded; the swimming hole was stagnant at its edges by mid-July. A dark flickering appeared in the corners of her eyes, and at first she didn’t know what it was, but every day it seemed closer, stronger, closing in. If you found the one person you loved, and you couldn’t lick his neck or stick your nose up under his hair, or fall asleep tangled in his limbs, what did you do? Her tears ran without warning, sudden sobs made her chest jump. A new line trembled on the horizon, a fine dark fissure opened between objects: the abyss, beckoning. She tried to pray: Look, whoever’s listening. Let them finish. Send him back. We won’t survive apart.

  She wasn’t making specific plans, but that hairline crack, she knew, could widen instantly to accommodate her, and day by day, its thin blackness grew less frightening, more logical and familiar, as if she could now walk right up, touch it with her fingertips, and, with a quick last smile over her shoulder at the fading world, slip right in. She was sorry. If she ever did, he’d mistake it for the meanest thing imaginable. But the natural outcome of abandonment was a failure to thrive, to survive.

  She didn’t see how she could continue much longer. Eating seemed senseless. At Younts, she passed up the two-pound Yuban special; she couldn’t imagine living long enough to drink it all.

  * * *

  The first time she passed Sylvia in her blue Imperial on Noah Mountain Road, Cress felt as if she’d been squeezed like a sponge.

  She took a box of winter clothes to the barn and was drawn into the old mechanic’s bay, which was cool and smelled of dirt and oil. She crouched on the floor between oil spots, then sat for an hour. The next day, she swept it out, found carpet scraps that fit, and made a tiny, subterranean room. A thick round of cut pine served as a table. On this, she put a candle and the little donkey. She brought a pillow and her old down sleeping bag, and she would lie there, fingertips on each cool concrete wall. By remaining absolutely still, she could make an hour pass, then two hours, three. Any movement and the pain unfurled.

  On Noah Mountain Road, a row of telephone poles planted in the left shoulder of a curve introduced themselves. All she’d have to do was not turn the steering wheel.

  * * *

  “If he was really going to leave her, he would’ve done it the first time round,” said Donna. Cress had stopped by to see the sycamore tree, the Hapsaw, the lilac bush once more.

  “Of adulterers who leave their spouses,” Donna went on, “something like 95 percent do it in the first three months of the affair.”

  * * *

  Somehow Cress went to work. She wouldn’t desert Dalia and Lisette again, as she had last year. She clocked in and washed lettuce for the cook, hauled the tables around, flung starched white cloths over them, arranged silverware, built tall pyramids out of wide-mouth champagne glasses; she trayed out hors d’oeuvres, took cocktail orders. She spoke rarely and in a whisper. In this way, moment to moment, by turning to the next small task, by functioning as part of a larger mechanism, she kept on.

  Dalia called her into the office. “Oh, Cress. We’ve all had our hearts broken, but you can’t let it go on too long, and take it in too deep. You’ve got to save yourself—go see someone, try to meditate, something. Or you might never make it back.”

  Back to where? Back to what? Her old life—school, econ—no longer existed. She could finish her dissertation, but where would that take her? There was no place she wanted to go, or could imagine ever wanting to go. She had to be where he could find her.

  * * *

  Somehow—perhaps because she was too polite and too intimidated by Silas not to return his calls or complete the next column she’d promised him (this one about art resale profits and commissions)—she did the research and wrote it. Her reporting was minimal; talking to people was the hardest part; she couldn’t drum interest into her voice. She made do with a few meager facts and data she’d coaxed from a secretary at Sotheby’s and one voluble gallery owner. Of the eighty thousand dollars in increased value, the artist received 2 percent.

  Change that: an appalling 2 percent.

  * * *

  She lost twelve pounds. She weighed what she had at fourteen. For her third column, Cress went south to interview an art consultant over lunch. She drove down the night before, to stay at Braithway. Tillie had promised to dress her.

  Tillie said, “You may not see it right now, but it’s really for the best. Also, Cress, you look like a model.”

  She sent Cress off in a pencil skirt and the big-shouldered power jacket.

  The consultant purchased art for corporations and hospitals, and also for actors and movie execs who didn’t have the time—or the eye—to shop. “After they buy the BMW and take the trekking vacation,” the woman said, “these guys buy art.” The consultant had selected the restaurant for their meeting, and their two pretty,
clean-tasting, hand-built salads cost fifty dollars.

  Cress went from lunch to the magazine offices, where she finally met Silas, a tall, soft-looking man her age. Taking the lunch receipt, he said, “Ooh la la! Now there’s a woman who is good at spending other people’s money!” Column three’s lede: Maude Sweeney has a talent for spending other people’s money.

  * * *

  Days passed. Work at Beech Creek slowed down. In the hot late afternoons after golf lady luncheons or the Rotarians, Cress took a glass of wine to the barn, into the cool trough. She lit a candle, drank the wine, and lay down on her sleeping bag. She counted her breaths backward from a hundred, a form of meditation she’d read about. She rarely remembered getting below the eighties. She woke up to a guttering flame, or utter darkness. That was when she knew it most keenly. He was coming back. He was on his way.

  * * *

  Cress drove south in early September for her fourth column, which was about an international art exposition at the convention center. Galleries from all over the world displayed paintings and sculptures in souklike warrens. The middle class had disposable income again, and goods were pouring in. Even Cress, whose arms felt like lead, who had no taste for life, was making money—not a lot, but more than she ever had: her own small share of the boom pot.

  Driving to Los Angeles and back, always alone, her mind stayed busy with its own absorbing mix of memory and hope. She replayed their encounters, combing them for clues and meaning, as if their love was a great mystery or puzzle to be solved. Had he really gone back for good? She didn’t believe it. He could no more give her up than she could forget him. He was struggling, too.

  If only there was a way they could be together and not hurt anybody else.

  She returned again and again to her little house in the tilted pasture: to her hard bed, her cool, tiny, secret room in the barn.

  Trey Kidman, who hadn’t seen her walking in weeks, came by bringing brownies with some sparkle. Was she okay? She looked so pale and sad—did she want him to rub her back?

  “No, no. That’s all right, thanks,” she said, moving away.

  He left, and she threw the brownies in the trash.

  * * *

  Dalia and Lisette took her out for drinks after work, in hopes of cheering her up. They went to the Lakeview bar, the Sawyer Inn, and talked brightly, trying to interest Cress with confidences. Dalia told the story of her brutal five-year marriage. Lisette told them how she used to be the girlfriend of a famous rock star, but she’d hated that life and had to leave it. She was glad, because then she met her husband—after nine years they still made love every single day.

  Touched by their company, Cress nodded and sipped her beer and asked questions to simulate interest and keep them talking.

  “You don’t know they’re going to be physically abusive until they are,” Dalia said.

  “Oh yes, it’s definitely mutual,” said Lisette. “We both want to.”

  And, “No! But then, we vary it a lot, sometimes we draw it out with massage or toys, whatever, and sometimes it’s a quickie.”

  * * *

  At a hundred days, Cress lobbed his fly-tying vise into the swimming hole, but the smallish plunk and splash gave her no lift. Twenty-five days later, the silver flask flashed up in the water, like a trout’s pale belly, then glugged water and sank. She couldn’t bring herself to smash the donkey, whose black eyes shone. She could keep one memento. Something that, in thirty years, she could still admire. The finely delineated mane. The precise hoofs and tiny black teats.

  Trey Kidman came again; this time she was in the barn, counting backward in the concrete bay. He called her name at the gate, then knocked on her door; she was afraid he’d try the barn next, but after a while he left.

  * * *

  In mid-October, rain came in daylong bursts, leaving the land sodden, the dry grasses beaten flat and mildewing. She retrieved her boxes of warm clothes from the barn. When she lifted the garments out, the wool and cashmere were full of holes, speckled with larval crumbs.

  He couldn’t bear this any more than she could. She was sure of it. But he was doing what needed to be done. Making a real attempt. The dark flickers persisted in her peripheral vision. She drove up the narrow logging road toward Wanderwood, until she was face-to-face with Noah Mountain’s slag piles. She parked and got out; she could see right down into the family compound: the mother’s white clapboard house, the trailers big and small. Sylvia’s car parked at an angle. Stacks of wood, of rusty junk, an old water heater. A haphazard rural cluster: Would it ever be her home?

  She tried to drive on to Wanderwood, to be, at least, in his favorite place. But the road was more treacherous than she’d remembered, and after scraping the bottom of the Saab on a rock, she lost heart and had to back up for most of a mile before she found a place to turn around.

  * * *

  She passed Quinn on the road. His fingers lifted off the steering wheel in a quick gallop that rippled through her, reset her heart to a mad bang.

  * * *

  “He’s suffering, too.” She was at Braithway again, having come down for a meeting at the magazine. She and Tillie drank wine in her kitchen. “I feel it.”

  “You know what? I can’t talk to you about Quinn anymore. He’s gone back to his wife. It’s over. You’re obsessed. You should talk to a professional.”

  Cress was surprised, and somewhat flattered that her unhappiness might qualify her in Tillie’s eyes for a therapist.

  “And you need to start eating,” Tillie added. “It’s getting scary. Now you look like a junkie.”

  * * *

  Cress’s mother had never visited her in college or grad school. In Sylvia Hartley’s worldview, children visited parents. Yet here she was, self-invited, at Cress’s door, having driven up from Carpenteria that morning. She held a sack of groceries: a leg of lamb, bananas, V8 juice, food she remembered Cress liking as a child. There were more presents in the car: a polka-dot comforter, two Indian-print blouses, an electric popcorn popper, all Price Club bargains.

  Sylvia Hartley stalked through the little house, which was too clean to fault. “Do you like living here?”

  “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived.” Cress motioned toward the slanted fields, the ring of blue mountains.

  “Many places are beautiful. And closer to your friends and the magazine!”

  “I can’t move south. It feels like going backwards.”

  Sylvia sighed loudly and sat on the couch. She extended her legs, examined the ring on her right hand, a sapphire sunk in yellow gold. “It’s time to move on,” she said. “Time to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

  “What if I don’t have any bootstraps?” Cress said. “What are bootstraps, anyway?”

  “What about your dissertation? Have you lost interest in that?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. Maybe.”

  “After all that time and work and money?” Sylvia surveyed the small living room with its pale carpet and random furniture. She frowned at the wicker love seat as if she could not quite place it. “What’s going on, Cress, that your friends are calling me to say you’re in terrible shape and they’re afraid you might do something bad to yourself?”

  “Who called you?”

  “Never mind who.”

  “I’m just sad about Quinn.”

  “For crying out loud, Cress. It’s not realistic, after all this time, to go on and on about him. He’s a married man!”

  “I’m not going on and on.”

  “I don’t know what happened with you girls. Sharon only likes foreign men and you only like married ones.”

  “Not ones, Mom. One. One man. But maybe if you’d let us have a more normal social life in high school—”

  “Here we go,” her mother said.

  “I’m just saying, maybe if I’d had more experience with guys when I was young—”

  “I know what you’re saying. The mother is always to blame.”

  Cre
ss lacked the energy for this—or any—argument. She wept weakly.

  Sylvia watched her. “What do you need? I’ll help you with whatever it is. An apartment in San Francisco? Seattle? I think you should go away. Get out of this place. Take a long trip. If you’d done that back when I first suggested it, you’d be beyond all this by now. Europe? Japan? I’ll buy your ticket.”

  Sylvia lowered her voice. “Of course, you can’t tell your father. But I have a little nest egg. I can spend it however I want. If you need me to, I’ll go with you. Wherever you want. Whatever it takes to pull you out of this.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere, Mom. I’m fine here.”

  “Do you really think he’s going to leave his wife?”

  “No.” Cress shook her head, slinging tears. She no longer thought so grandly. Her hopes were more circumspect; she hoped to see and speak to him, to smell up under his hair again. To stop the pain for a minute here, a minute there.

  “You wouldn’t want him, anyway,” her mother said. “Not for a husband. Not in the long run.”

  “I’d like to find that out for myself.”

  Her mother went to the kitchen and came back with two glasses of wine. “I’d like to take you to a hospital, Cress. I think you need to check yourself in.”

  “You mean like a nuthouse? A booby hatch?”

  “You’re not in good shape, Cress. You’re way too skinny. You’re talking at half speed. I can barely hear you.”

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  “I can’t help you if you don’t let me.”

  “I’m okay, Mom. You don’t need to do anything.”

  “I do. I do need to do something. I can’t let you slip through my fingers.”

  “It’s okay, Mom, I’m all right.”