The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  So they would have Lux cremated after all. It was the sensible thing to do. With a sense of resignation he carried the spade back to the toolshed and stowed it next to its useful cousins. His antics now seemed keenly embarrassing; what a wonder Claire put up with him at all. He found her in the kitchen, kneeling beside Lux and peacefully stroking his noble head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I apologize. I was acting like a fool.”

  She looked up at him with the same compassionate gaze she had bestowed on Lux. “Are you all right?” she asked forgivingly. “Even last night, you didn’t seem to be quite yourself.”

  Of course she had noticed his agitation. Forty years of marriage made even the most guarded soul transparent. And Reid and Libby, no doubt, had noticed as well, commenting on their host’s distraction on their ride home—if, indeed, they even spoke to each other anymore except in the presence of others, so transparent to one another had they become. Even Lux, his senses dimmed but still acute, attuned to currents his human counterparts could not detect, had noticed something amiss. Had seen the coming storm and chosen to escape while there was still time.

  He considered for a moment the troubling omen, then rebuked himself sharply. He hated that in himself: committed to shining reason, contemptuous of superstition in all its benighted forms, whether fear of the number thirteen or the adoration of venerable icons—was there anyone, at heart, more cravenly superstitious than he?

  “Louis,” Claire repeated. “Is something the matter?”

  “No, no,” he said, startled from his thoughts. He could not bring himself to tell her his fears. He could not confess the haunting sense that he himself was mysteriously responsible for whatever might be unfolding between Tracy Parker and his student; nor could he confess that the esteemed Noah Lathrop Senior spooked him as much as the avenging angel itself. For the time being, hoping against hope (and might it all not turn out to be nothing more than a misunderstanding?), he would maintain the steady course: carry the body back to its pillow, tidy up the mess on the floor, pretend desperately that everything, even as dire shadows flickered all around, was in fact just fine.

  Eleanor Osterhoudt gazed out at the world with her usual aspect of profound sourness. She resembled, to a remarkable degree, especially when twin plumes of smoke issued from her nostrils, a gargoyle set up to guard the inner sanctum.

  “I trust your holidays were pleasant,” Louis said.

  “With this weather?” She rolled her eyes and took a long puff. “But you missed all that. Was Arizona nice?”

  “Arizona was, in fact, quite nice,” he said. “I could even imagine retiring there someday.”

  “You’ll never get me in one of those retirement communities,” Eleanor told him with a shudder. “All those old people. How depressing. Give me the younguns any day. Keeps my spirits up.”

  “There’re plenty of young people in Arizona,” he reassured her, musing that she did, however, have a point. The sight of all those fresh-faced students as he walked to his office had unmistakably lifted his bleak spirits. The very acknowledgment of that fact, however, cast him down again. The old troubles closed in.

  “By the way,” he asked, trying his best to sound casual, “You haven’t seen Tracy Parker by any chance this morning, have you?”

  “He hasn’t been in. Reid stopped by looking for you. And Sandra poked her head in to say hello. She’s a dear.”

  “She is a dear,” Louis agreed, his mind already elsewhere as he entered the inner sanctum of his office. At least his answering machine wasn’t blinking angrily.

  “But speak of the devil,” Eleanor announced from the outer office. Louis turned toward the door, expecting to see the affable, mildly flirtatious Sandra Robertson, to whom he would have to break the news about Lux, but it was not Sandra Robertson. He remembered, with a vividness that took him aback, that first hot afternoon in August when Tracy Parker had walked through that door. Having not laid eyes on him in a month, he was struck again by the young man’s charm, the sheer enthusiasm for life he seemed to exude from every pore, as if he stood burnished in a golden halo. He is a homosexual, murmured a thrilling, inflammatory voice somewhere deep inside Louis, and the elder man felt himself, almost palpably, catch fire. “Why Tracy, hello,” he exclaimed in surprise and relief.

  “Sorry for not getting back to you,” Tracy said. “I didn’t get your message till last night.” Beneath his golden glow, did he seem tense and haggard, or was Louis prepared to see in his expression only what he wanted to see? Then Tracy smiled and said, “It’s good to see you, Louis.”

  No one, Louis thought fleetingly, should be allowed to smile like that. Completely disarmed, he found himself relaying the very message he had been prepared to give Sandra: “I’m afraid I have a bit of very sad news, Tracy. Lux died this morning. He was ancient, of course, nearly as ancient as I am, but I know you cared about him.”

  Tracy looked genuinely shocked. “That’s terrible,” he said. “I’m really sorry.” Spontaneously reaching out, he touched Louis on the arm, a commiserating gesture, tingling and electric, a touch that clearly, in the right circumstances, could heal. It was all Louis could do not to withdraw from the clasp of that hand.

  “That makes me so sad,” Tracy continued. “Lux was a really special animal.”

  Louis couldn’t help himself: from the corner of his eye he wiped the tear he had been relieved, earlier, not to have shed. Tracy’s hand remained on his upper arm, its grip, once Louis had surrendered to it, firm and reassuring, Tracy’s brown-eyed gaze as deep and searching, in its way, as Lux’s used to be.

  He was embarrassed that Tracy had seen the tear.

  “But that was not why I called,” he went on briskly, remembering his duty even while a part of himself, grateful and terrifically well disposed toward Tracy at the moment, hesitated even to bring up the unpleasant business. “I came over to the office yesterday and found quite a number of rather puzzling telephone messages from the father of one of our students, I believe one of your students. Noah Lathrop. There seems to have been some kind of misunderstanding at home, crossed lines of communication, that kind of thing. You know how these broken homes can be, mother and father at cross purposes all the time, the poor kid caught in the middle. Anyway, Mr. Lathrop seemed to have some notion that his son had come up here to school early. He mentioned that he might be staying with someone up here. I was just wondering—since you know him—whether, well, whether you knew anything at all about this, how shall we say, bit of confusion…. Not that you should, necessarily,” he added for good measure.

  “Well, actually, I don’t,” Tracy said without missing a beat. “I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Noah Lathrop.” He paused, thoughtfully, as if deciding how much detail he should go into. “Not that I’d really expect to hear from him. He’s a somewhat difficult student, as I think you’re aware. I wouldn’t say that he and I are on particularly good terms”—he hesitated almost imperceptibly—“these days.”

  “It was my impression you had become rather good pals,” Louis probed gingerly.

  Tracy laughed. “Oh,” he said. “That’s news to me.”

  But hadn’t they been pals? Was it possible he’d misread everything from the very beginning? He wasn’t sure whether that possibility elated or unnerved him.

  “I thought,” he said, “I mean, I seemed to remember, when I visited your class, there was, well, you seemed to have a good relationship with him outside the classroom.”

  “I’m not sure Noah Lathrop has a good relationship with anybody,” Tracy said. “I did try, though. It’s not like there’s a problem there. He’s taking English Two from me this semester—later this morning, in fact. But I wouldn’t say I know him particularly well. No better than I do any of the other boys.”

  “I see,” Louis said. “Well, I was just wondering. It’s a big mystery to me what those phone calls were about. The father’s out of the country right now.”

  “I get the feeling,” Tracy said
, “that he’s almost always out of the country. That is, when he’s not out of his mind.”

  The bluntness of the observation was a little shocking. “Is that what Noah tells you?” Louis asked.

  “He did tell me that,” Tracy said. “Yes he did.” He glanced at his watch, then said, “I’m going to be late for my first class if I don’t run.”

  “Well, welcome back to the old grindstone,” Louis told him, noting, from the clock on the wall, that Tracy was, as usual, being prudent: he had ample time to make his class.

  “Again, I’m really sorry about Lux,” the thoughtful young man commiserated on his way through the door.

  With a sigh of relief, Louis sank onto the sofa and leaned back, his arms loose, the tension clenched there since yesterday emptying from him in a long-sustained gesture of thanks. If he hadn’t gotten around to asking where Tracy had been for the past week, that was because it hardly seemed necessary anymore. Whatever else he might be, Tracy Parker was clearly a consummate professional when it came to his work. In that, Louis had complete faith, and he regretted that he had ever doubted it.

  For a single moment he considered the possibility of resuming old times. How easy it would be to seek the young man out later in the day, invite him over for an evening of music, a nip of scotch. There was some Schumann he’d been longing to play for his eager listener. But then in the next moment such a plan seemed completely impossible. With that sense of missed opportunity that had dogged him throughout his life, he realized sadly that, despite the morning’s reassuring news, far too much had changed for them ever to go back to the innocent terms of those days of autumn, before Tracy Parker’s regrettable liabilities had muddied the clear waters of their great, promising friendship.

  XIV

  These days of January you could feel, were you so inclined, in something of a state of siege. If, by temperament, Claire was not so inclined, she nevertheless found herself anticipating with some dread the onslaught of the next winter storm, the third in as many weeks. A foot, a foot and a half, was being forecast, and a fourth blizzard was said to be hard on the heels of the current threat. She’d never been one to batten down the hatches, but the cautiousness of old age was perhaps beginning to catch up with her. Why else would she have ventured out to the Grand Union on an afternoon when half the population of Middle Forge seemed intent on laying in supplies?

  Unable to find a cart at the entrance, or even a handbasket, she wandered the jostling aisles on the off chance that an abandoned cart might be adrift among the throngs. Instead, her eye was caught by a young man in the produce aisle who was inspecting a head of romaine lettuce. He’d filled the child’s seat of his cart with a festive assortment of kale, collard greens, red-leafed lettuce—a garden on wheels. When he turned around to add the romaine to his collection she found herself looking Tracy Parker in the face.

  Her heart quickened nervously; she felt a blush come over her. “Well, hello stranger,” she said with a cheerfulness she hoped might cover her surprise. She had not seen him in six weeks, and though she had thought of him—with concern, with pity, and yes, she might as well admit it, a certain longing (she missed him)—she had done nothing at all to be in touch. Not that Louis had instructed her one way or another. As if it never had happened, they’d not mentioned that dinner party again; a ridiculous pretense, of course, since it had so palpably happened, and with such consequences. In the blink of an eye, the young man they’d seen sometimes as many as three times a week for the past two months had simply disappeared from their lives. Had Tracy known, instinctively, that he would have to wait for Louis to summon him to the house again—and, receiving no summons, had not pressed the point? How fragile relationships were between people, how easily upset—especially friendship, that delicate alliance bereft of the formal bonds that at least gave marriages a fighting chance.

  And yet, as if there had been no awkwardness or estrangement, Tracy greeted her warmly, confiding, “I’d never have come out here if I’d known this place was going to be so mobbed. Did we declare war or something?”

  “On the television,” Claire told him, remembering he didn’t have a television, “they’re saying we’re in for another big storm.”

  “Oh great. Like we’re all going to be snowed in for three weeks. What’re these people thinking?”

  “It’s panic,” she said, feeling like a conspirator, though she too, she reminded herself, had come here out of her own version of panic. But now she had stepped to the other side, Tracy’s side, a place of humor and common sense. It felt a rather enjoyable place to be.

  “Well, panic or not,” he told her, “the romaine here sucks. But I get what I deserve. I was too lazy to drive out to the health-food store.”

  She tried to think of some gallant retort, but the surprise of seeing him again had taken her wit away. He looked at her sympathetically. “I was very sorry to hear about Lux,” he said quietly. “Lux was a great, wise dog.”

  It made a tear, for a moment, come to her eye. They would never see Lux again. That era of their lives was gone. “We’d been so worried,” she told this kind young man whom Lux had seemed to take to. “We knew his time was coming, but the thought of putting him down…” Even now, she found herself choking up to talk of it. “In the end, he was very considerate. He folded his tent and moved on quietly. He died in his sleep, on his favorite pillow in the kitchen.”

  “Louis told me,” Tracy said.

  It took a second to sink in.

  Of course, she thought. Her husband and Tracy would have to talk. They worked together, after all. There were all sorts of reasons for them to talk. Nonetheless, Louis had said not a word about any conversation with Tracy Parker during these long weeks of supposed estrangement, and she found herself suddenly resenting her husband’s unilateral ways. Tracy had, after all, been her friend as well.

  “How’s Betsy?” she asked, eager to move herself away from the brooding she knew she was doomed to return to later.

  “Betsy is just great. And I was thinking just the other day about when you and I went to the pound to get her. That was a fun morning.”

  It had been great fun, in fact (but what had ever happened to the gray cat, the one without hope?). And what did it matter that Tracy Parker was gay? Their connection, immediate and frank, had been the connection of friends drawn together through common sympathies, shared interest. Too bad they now found themselves stranded in the shoals of polite banter, while the deep intimate ocean beckoned.

  He seemed to have similar thoughts, but, unlike her, he acted on them. “Do you know what?” he said. “I do not feel like coping with this madding crowd right now. Let’s say we ditch our shopping carts and go get a cup of coffee somewhere. Would you be up for that?”

  That was what had struck her about him from the start: his youthful, refreshing spontaneity, the sense that the world was ripe with enchanting possibilities. When was the last time she’d ditched, as he put it, her shopping cart—or anything else?

  “Why not?” she said, feeling twenty years younger and, against all odds, attractive again—and not just to the likes of a Tim Veeder.

  “Where did you leave yours?” Tracy asked.

  “Actually,” she told him, “I never even got that far. I came down the vegetable aisle looking for a stray cart and I found you instead.”

  “Then we were both in luck,” he said with a smile so sympathetic, so warming, that for an instant she found herself falling for him the way she had that long-ago morning in the animal shelter. “Let me put my lettuces back,” he continued, “and we’ll get out of here.”

  That rare thing, she thought: a free spirit with a sense of responsibility. A conscience.

  Besides the Grand Union, Middle Forge Plaza was home to a number of smaller stores staked out bravely among the vacant ones: Eagle Eyeglass Emporium, Palumbo’s Wine and Spirits, a tai kwon do studio, and a recently opened venture called Chamonix, which sold gourmet coffees and European chocolates. Claire stopped
there from time to time with Libby, who regularly treated herself, after their yoga class and healthy lunch, to a box or two of chocolate consolation. This afternoon, as always, Chamonix was desperately empty. It felt delicious, though, to seat herself with Tracy at a small table at the window and sip rich Tanzanian coffee, all caution thrown to the winter winds, while the rest of Middle Forge busily hunkered down for the coming storm.

  “So tell me,” he said. “How’ve you been? How was your trip to…where was it?”

  “Arizona,” she said. “Tucson. We were visiting out daughter Caroline.”

  “And how was that?”

  She considered the polite response, then decided to go ahead and tell the truth. “Difficult,” she said. “It’s very bleak out there—the landscape, I mean. Depressing. It made me want to cry with frustration. Does a landscape ever do that to you? Louis thinks I’m crazy, but I could simply never live in a place like that. I need my garden, my flowers. Though it’s always nice to see one’s child, you know, the adult they’ve grown into. But I worry about her, Tracy. She’s thirty-four years old; she lives alone. She says, ‘Thank God there’s no one in my life right now,’ and I think she means it, just as I think she means it when she tells me that she’s quite happy, utterly devoted to her work. But I do worry. She’s my daughter, after all. It’s not good for people to live without love, whatever they may tell themselves. It’s not healthy.”

  The intensity of Tracy’s response took her by surprise. “Tell me love matters,” he said plaintively, looking at her with a shockingly disconsolate expression on his handsome face. “It does, doesn’t it?”

  “Of course it does,” Claire told him firmly. In so many ways he was just a boy who needed mothering. And where was his own mother, his family? What were they like? She knew so little about him, really, beyond the charm and assurance he usually projected, that she had to remind herself there was undoubtedly more to him—perhaps much more—than those pleasant surfaces might indicate. “Absolutely, love matters,” she reiterated for the sake of that other Tracy whose loves and fears she knew nothing about. “We forget that at our own risk.”