by Ron Carlson
There was such an edge in all of this for her. There had been a part-time slot, and it became a full-time administrative assistant, her new job. It gave her a jolt, having an office and a big window looking across to the high school and the hospital and the rooftops beyond. She guessed it was pride when she tried to tell her mother about her work, her mother who had lived forever ten blocks from the museum. The expectation was museum equals oil paintings of red flowers in a blue bowl. That was the way Stewart had put it. And that was finally all Marci would give her mother on the phone: it’s not all red flowers in a blue bowl, which would send Mrs. Engle over the edge. She’d say back to her daughter, “Marci, you need to give me a little credit here.” Marci would invoke Stewart, the curator, and talk about how all he was trying to do for Oakpine was introduce their old town to such new ideas. “Marci,” her mother would say, “We’ve taken Time magazine for forty years, and I’d love to see a new idea.”
Regardless, Marci found the pressure of hanging a new show a puzzle, assessing the aesthetic and trying to describe and explain the thing in a way that would draw people to the show. She was on the inside here, a member of the steering committee, and with Larry in high school, she gave it all of her attention. This new “Terrain” display would get written up in Cheyenne if not in Denver.
It also rushed her that Stewart wanted her to go to Chicago after Thanksgiving, on museum business, for the National Museum Society. They’d be in the same hotel. That was the way he had said what he said: We’ll be in the same hotel. December first loomed for her, drew her forward through the fall. In the meantime, she closed the museum every Tuesday night, and he was often there. She watched him make work to stay around, always there to give her a look, pat her hand, put his arm around her waist, sweet and sort of fun, and sometimes both arms, a quick embrace stolen in the hall, mock dramatic, pretending to pin her against the wall and then pinning her against the wall. It was high school certainly, but she liked the feel of his suits, and she liked how angular he was, so utterly different from Craig. But mainly she liked his smell, so dry and sweet, and how smooth his face was. It was nice to feel sought. She played it that way. She loved the moment after she’d turned off the lights in the display areas and turned on the security lights, when he’d come out of his office and meet her in the hall. It was the meeting that started her heart, his taking her, the kiss, the way he put her against the wall. There was a rush in this, but also a limit. She’d dressed for all of this so far, but also she’d dressed to keep him out: layers. Now, however, she was going in a few weeks on business to Chicago.
The night before the opening of the geologic show, Marci held a gala preview for museum patrons and friends. She closed the building at two in the afternoon, did a last walk-through, and waited for the caterers. These were the nicest rooms in Oakpine. In two hours they would be full of Oakpine’s finest. The show was bright and lively, large plates of stone and realistic landscapes and surreal landscapes, mountains and plains. She straightened again the show guides on the oak tables in the glassed lobby. Stewart was waiting for her in their hall, and they fell together easily, familiarly. She felt his hands on the back of her skirt, and he pressed her against the wall, kissing her with more urgency than she’d expected. “You’re going to wrinkle me all up.”
“Good,” he said. “With an hour, we can do a good job of that.”
“Stewart.”
He was at her neck now, his mouth. “I want this,” he said. He ran his hand up under her blouse. His hand on the fabric quickened the moment, but while they were still kissing, she pulled his arm down and away. She thought of what Mason had said to her the week before. A metaphor. The back of his neck was clean to her touch. He’d been to the barber this afternoon. “But we’ve got the caterers. Let’s meet after.”
“Afterward you’ll start to act awkward and then run off. You won’t stay and let me drive you.”
She felt smart in all of it, smart and desired, but the truth was that she was confused. There was a taste of danger in it, but they had gone slowly, inching along all year. Stewart had been considerate, and they’d left so many moments unfinished with a kind of promise over it all, an infatuation that she found delicious.
She was about to say, “In fifty-nine minutes Tip Top Bakery will be buzzing at the back door with all their goodies.” In fact, she thought the words, preparing the sentence. But before she could say it, Wendy Ingram came around the corner carrying a cardboard box of labeling materials. Marci looked Wendy in the face, and before she could shrug Stewart off or make him aware of what was going on, Wendy passed them, without a word, and was gone toward the workroom way in the back.
“What?” Stewart said. “Please.”
Marci took his face in both her hands and looked at him. “No. Not now. We need to be careful. Wait.” She kissed him and set him back away from her. She liked the way he looked at her now; some of this was so sweet, so much fun. “Wendy’s still here. She saw us. At some point tonight, let her know that you’d grabbed me in a moment of joy at a job well done, something like that.”
“Not a problem,” he said. He was already putting on his game face. “Excellent.”
She watched him go and then folded her arms and leaned against the wall. High school. Three years ago, when Craig had unrolled the plans for the new house on their old kitchen table, he’d said, “Let’s do this. It’s something we’ve always wanted. But if we’re going to be unhappy, let’s do that now and not wait until we’re in the new house.” Why did he think to say that? The remark wasn’t like him at all.
• • •
In making deliveries for the hardware store, Larry Ralston always double-parked the truck and then ran to the end of whatever block he was on and turned, taking serpentine steps and sometimes running backward down to the other end of the block as if on his toes and then back to the truck, where he would open the back gates and grab whatever he was delivering and take it to the door. People were used to seeing him running. Now he loped down Berry Street and back, and then he reached in the truck for the envelopes, which weighed five ounces, and he skipped back to Jimmy Brand’s garage and knocked on the door. There was no answer, but sometimes, Jimmy Brand did not answer. It was a sunny October Friday afternoon.
“What is it?” Edgar Brand had come out onto the back porch and was addressing the boy.
“Hello,” Larry said. “I was just going to see Mr. Brand. Jimmy. He asked me to come over to check on his—” Before he could finish the sentence with the word guitar, which came out as an offbeat afterthought, Edgar had stepped back inside and the door shut. Larry pushed into the garage and peeked in. “Yo, Jimmy?” In the gloom, Larry could see the form of Jimmy’s body under the covers. He laid the paper packet of guitar strings on the dresser and slipped out.
He started his truck, pulled an easy U-turn on the street, and slowly drove three doors to Mason Kirby’s house, where three men worked along the crest of the new roof. The yard was littered with bits of torn shingle and other carpentry debris. Mason and Craig worked along the side of the house on a low scaffold, securing the new aluminum rain gutters. His dad had lost weight in the month’s work, and he looked at home tacking the stripping in the eaves. Mason had moved back into the old house and had kidded with Larry about crashing anytime at his bachelor pad. “Of course,” Mason had added, “you’ve got the same problem I have. No date.” Larry liked Mason, having him in town. The time he’d stayed with them had been fun, his father looser and more with it than Larry could remember. It was obvious that his dad enjoyed working on the old Kirby place. They’d talked into the night, going through the old yearbooks with his mother, talking about Mason’s divorce, which had taken two years or something.
“Larry!” his dad called. “You want to get some lunch?”
“Naw, you guys go on. I’ve got four more stops, including all this Romex for those guys building the duplex in Rosepark.”
“I do.” Larry grinned. “It’s mine for the taking, Mason. My legs want every block. It’s a way to put the charm on this sleepy town.”
“Nice game, I hear,” Mason said.
“Strike early, stay ahead,” Larry said. “And be real fast and real lucky. We’ve got Jackson Hole this week—the city kids will be a test.” Larry pointed at Mason. “How is that hand?”
“Cured. Stronger than ever. I just wear the bandage for show. I see you down at the Brands. What’s up with Jimmy?” Mason put down a section of gutter and hopped to the ground, coming over to Larry’s window. “How’s he doing?”
“Sleeping. Yesterday he said he’d like to see you.”
“Come back later if you can,” Mason said. “We’ll take him down some dinner.”
The roofers gathered up their tools and fastened their two extension ladders to the top of their truck rack in full dark. Two of them walked the yard picking up the old shingles and throwing them into a large cardboard box they dragged around the whole house. Mason wrote them a check on the hood of the vehicle and shook all three men’s hands. When they’d driven off, Craig came from around back, where he’d been putting his own tools on the porch. “Okay,” he said. “Let it rain. Tomorrow we can go inside and start spackling and test some of the wiring and replace the cracked switchboxes.”
“You like this, don’t you?” Mason asked his friend.
“It’s good work, don’t you think?”
“I believe it is,” Mason said. “It beats kissing ass around a conference table.”
They had walked across, and Craig got in his truck. “It beats pricing tubes of caulk. You want to come in tomorrow, pick out the paint.”
“No, just bring it out. We’ll go with that sky white. It’s workable and leaves the new owners plenty of options.”
“Good with me.” Craig began to back his truck out the drive.
“And bring some of that caulk,” Mason said. “Bring plenty.”
• • •
When his friend had left, Mason went in and showered, holding his injured hand above the spray. It was healing fast. He was utterly at sea, and he welcomed being lost and had no haste about emerging. He liked his new little Spartan life in the back of this old house. He had the kitchen and his parents’ old bedroom and the tiny bath that adjoined it. His suitcase was open on the hardwood floor, and it pleased him to open the closet and see five shirts and two pairs of pants hanging in the empty space. He dressed, put on the one sport coat he’d brought, a brown tweed that was almost twenty years old, and sat back down on the little futon Craig had loaned him. He couldn’t quite think, gather his life up yet, but it was coming.
He was openly surprised by how quickly his bright notion of his own life had rusted in the open air of Oakpine. In Denver he was his reputation in the workplace, and he was feared in the way that comes to be called respect. He wasn’t liked, but people didn’t speak badly of him. Now his knees ached, and it was that feeling, along with the burn in his upper arms, that he wanted to know about. His footing was slipping and then gone, and he didn’t want it back. Success. It wasn’t so simple, the chase and the money. He could feel something coming. He hadn’t cried in his life, not even under a bicycle as a child.
Though unchanged except for five or six coats of paint in the last thirty years, the room felt radically different to Mason, strange and new. His parents had had wallpaper in here, in much of the house, a dreary vertical floral pattern, mauve and gray, that made them seem even then only old, made the house seem meant for adults, something from another era. Certainly it would have been papered on before the war. There had been a crucifix on the wall opposite the bed, Christ on a gold cross that must have been a foot tall. His sister must have that out in Portland. And there had been a gilt-framed mirror over the bureau to one side. His parents’ bed had a little cabinet headboard on which there had been a maroon runner embroidered with gilt thread and a wooden shelled radio and a shiny black porcelain panther his father had brought back from Manila after World War II, when he was in the navy. Mason lay back on the bed. The original light fixture was still in place, a milky glass bowl hung on the old brass chain, and he remembered it. Now he saw it was the same type as the one in Lost Weekend in which Ray Milland hid a bottle of whiskey. This one was too small for that, but he could put a minibottle in there if things got real bad. Mason rubbed his eyes. Where was he? What was he doing? He had the urge to call Elizabeth in Denver and tell her he was confused; she’d take it as a sign of humanity.
His love for her was full of airy spaces, he saw now. As a driven man who had made his life around driven men and never known it, he was off balance in the quiet house. If he’d only found this silence ten years ago, she would not have gone away. It was the first still part, the first quiet part of his life. He could feel it pressing.
What he did was sit up and then stand up. In the kitchen he clipped the ends from two potatoes and put them in the oven. He had two folding chairs and the Formica table the Gunnars had left behind. Leaving the lights on, he went out the back door and walked down three houses to the Brands.
He didn’t walk anywhere now. He hadn’t walked for years. In Denver he parked his car in the basement of his office and walked to the elevators; he parked in the basement of his condominium and walked to the elevators. There were two places in his office building where he could get lunch, one up and one down, and to get to them, he walked to the elevators. He was never out of doors. It didn’t happen. He took an inventory now quickly and saw it was true. He walked fifty feet on painted concrete to the elevator and then upstairs, though the entry to his offices, and down the hallway on carpet. He would live the rest of his life and never wear out a pair of shoes. And now in the dark that smelled like turning leaves, he walked up to Jimmy Brand’s garage, a walk he’d taken a thousand times years and years ago. Sometimes he’d run. The sidewalk on Berry Street had been buckled by the poplars and cottonwoods, repoured, and buckled again. He’d been in some of these trees. The air was at his neck, not cold, but sweet and sharp. He couldn’t quite get the right stride, walking this route, and he felt exposed out in the old world, and this feeling too was part of his confusion. He felt strange and exposed tonight. He didn’t know what to do with his arms. It would have been ridiculous to drive. I’m so highly evolved that I can’t even walk, he thought.
He hadn’t seen Jimmy Brand for thirty years. He didn’t need to do the math. He had the morning in his head like a photograph. The days they’d spent in the Trail’s End Motel and after their encounter, Mason had twisted in a way he thought would certainly kill him, and then Jimmy let him off with a hand on the side of his face, that touch, and saying, “Let us get over ourselves. It’s okay. It’s over. The year. My life here.” He had smiled. “And that band is over with. Mason, I have to leave. Ten reasons, and you are not among them. I will see you again.” It was a morning in June, and the birds were crazy in the trees, calling, and Mason retrieved the car, and Jimmy came out of the room with his duffel. They drove without a word to the Greyhound station, which was an anteroom on Front Street by the tracks, and the bus was there idling. It had come and gone all his life, and Mason had never seen the bus before. Jimmy got out of the car and leaned back to say, “Don’t be an idiot. You were kind to me. Don’t look back. I’ll see you.” He shut the car door and went into the bus. A minute later the bus door closed, and it eased onto Front Street headed east. Mason turned off the car and got out and stood and looked across the street at the Antlers, bright from its new coat of paint, but still a dive. Two men sat on the sidewalk against the facade of the building, rolled blankets in their laps. If they got up and crossed the street, they could sit in the sun. The town was a plain little place before him, his home, and it felt now empty and without one mystery of its own.
• • •
Now he moved down the sidewalk on Berry Street stiffly, new at this game. He’d walked at first. He’d beat the streets for two years when he first came to Denver. Every time he’d hear of a firm with an opening, he was there. It was an era of close calls but no callbacks. Everybody liked him, and everybody knew him, but by the time there was a bona fide position ready for him, his own business had taken off. He’d started alone, taking what he could, some corporate spillover from the big companies. An old associate, on hearing that Mason did wills, trusts, and divorces, sent him some work. He wrote deeds. Mason did DUI’s for friends of friends only. He made a lot of money in a wrongful death suit on behalf of a family run down in a movie line by a drunk driver. Then the year he was thirty a big case fell on his desk. Fourteen people had been injured in one of the city’s softball complexes when the aluminum seating failed. Two would never walk again, and a child had perished. They had had representation by a firm in his building that hurried the deal and started talking money at the initial strategy session. The plaintiffs were hurt and shocked. Mason literally met them in the elevator, the five people from the three families that were suing the city. It was an accident, but he knew who they were. His first words when they got into the car and he assessed their faces were “You want a glass of water?”
He didn’t say it was a ploy, but it was a ploy. They talked two hours that first day, and he learned to listen, to try to grasp the weight of the damage. It was as close to empathy as he could get, and he learned that it helped him know how to talk to them.