by Deb Davies
What did she really know about Charles? He could be fickle and have perfected a way of luring women in. Maybe she was only one of a string of women who had succumbed to the “I’m just an amateur, ma’am” brand of charm.
How he would get the quilt clean? Would he anchor it in the stream and hang it to dry on the apple tree branches, or simply leave the residue of their sex? Had she made love on a quilt already crusted with cum?
“I hope that was all right,” he said. “That it didn’t feel like a betrayal.”
She gave a sigh that came all the way up from her diaphragm, like the sigh she gave to show a doctor that her lungs were clear.
“It didn’t feel like a betrayal,” she said. “In some ways, it felt like a confession. People assume I’m the good-as-gold wife, the woman who looked after her husband and never stopped loving him. And it’s true, and it’s not true. There were times near the end when I just kept doing what I could. I was the only one George wanted near him, but he didn’t want me to touch him, unless I had to. Sometimes, even then, he got angry and pushed me away. When that happened, especially after I’d just brought him a bed pan and changed his pajamas, I wanted to run away from the stranger he had become. Do you have anything to drink?”
“Courvoisier,” he said, and climbed out of bed, retrieving his shorts in the process, then slid back in to join her once he’d handed her the drink.
The brandy, even in its plain, somewhat scratched glass tumbler, shone pure as gold. The color wasn’t that different from that of the white cedar planks that made up the cabin walls. There was a small desk overflowing with books, notebooks, and papers in the kitchen, and bookshelves on every wall except one that held the window facing the creek.
She swirled the brandy, inhaling the faint scent of grapes that bloomed over the glass. She took a swallow, and warmth flowed from her toes to her hair roots.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said. “Why do you have Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons? Shouldn’t you have all the Gerald Durrell books instead?”
“They’re under the bed you slept in last night. I thought you were the dancer and Laurel was the brainy type.”
“I like that.” Claire sat up. “I read. Or I used to. And Laurel dances. Some. At least she used to.”
“I have Lawrence Durrell because he’s a marvelous writer. So is Gerald, but Larry’s writing is often darker, more political. Fits with how I see the world.”
She sat up straight, having just taken in a huge, mouth-burning swallow of brandy.
“Why don’t we go out and get something to eat?” he asked.
“I had that nice trout,” she said.
“That nice small trout,” he responded. “And I gave you most of it.”
“Where are we going?” She tugged on her clothes, rubber-legged with sexual lassitude.
“There’s a bar near here—Ma Deeter’s. It was built right about at the end of second-growth white pine logging. It burned to the ground and was rebuilt, but the sign has stayed the same—This Is God’s Country. Please Don’t Drive Thru Town Like Hell.”
The room smelled of secondhand smoke that clung to the clothes of people sitting near them, while beer battered fish, jalapeno fortified chili, hot dogs, and French fries competed for dominance.
“Luzerne—spelled with a Z, not a C the way it is in Switzerland—has seen better days,” Charles admitted. “But a lot of my history is here. Besides Deeter’s, which is pretty well known in Michigan, the town has a post office, a small IGA, and a good hardware store. Everything else changes over the years.”
Before they left the cabin, Claire had called Laurel on her cell phone while Charles checked on Oscar.
“I slept with him,” she’d said to Laurel, sotto voce.
“Why on earth would you do that?” Laurel, who was out of books, had been perusing George’s book collection.
“I don’t know,” Claire said, expecting Laurel’s help.
“Well, figure it out,” Laurel responded. “Find out what it is about Charles that made you slide off the celibacy wagon. If you can’t analyze the past, you’re doomed to repeat it.”
“Callous,” Claire had accused. “This isn’t a quiz on motivation.”
“Sorry,” Laurel said. “There are books all around me, and I can’t find anything to read.”
At the restaurant, Charles kept talking, but so much had changed so abruptly in her life, she couldn’t focus.
“I hate four wheelers,” he said. “Good thing riders usually stay on the trails.”
“Or else what? You’d blast ’em with a shotgun?”
“There was a wiseass kid who chased Ed’s dog with a snowmobile. It was a good dog, but it was so scared it had no idea what to do. We watched it dig under the branches of a snow-covered pine. While it was digging, a bobcat loped out from the back of the pine tree and took shelter in the woods. Ed’s dog stayed there, cowering while the snowmobile missed it by inches. Ed and me, we thought of stringing piano wire at throat height.”
“I can see you in prison, building birdhouses.”
“With some luck, they wouldn’t have found the snowmobile or the body. There are secrets in the swamps here. Can I have that pickle, if you’re not going to eat it?”
Ma Deeter’s rebuild after the fire had resulted in compromises. The pine table where Charles and Claire sat was covered with protective plastic. “I miss the pool tables that were here when I was a kid,” he added. There were a few families sitting near them, and one couple groomed to the gills on a date, but most of the clientele sported graying or bleached hair. One rowdy group had their attention fixed on a televised Tigers game. One man at the bar was so drunk, he made sitting on a bar stool look like riding a mechanical bull.
Claire ordered a second Bloody Mary with four olives and a pickle, and a chicken club sandwich. Charles had a three-inch-thick Reuben and coffee.
“You shouldn’t drive home tonight,” he said. “You drink like a fish.”
“Tactful, aren’t you?”
“Not what I’m known for.”
“Did you ever used to drink, Charles?”
“Some. I never had a great head for it. My grandfather was always disappointed. He drank Wild Turkey bourbon and thought a gentleman—self-made or not—should be able to hold his liquor. But it didn’t stop him leaving me a bequest.”
Claire chewed an ice cube. Charles, looking moody, caught the eye of their waitress.
“Jeanne, put a shot of Jameson in this for me.”
“Irish coffee,” she said. “You’ve got it, Charles.” She swiveled away, looking comfortable in a blue Ma Deeter’s T-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes.
“Oh, hell,” he said. “If it’s called Irish coffee, it’s going to come in a glass cup. Why can’t they put the booze in a coffee mug, the way it ought to be served?”
“I thought you weren’t drinking tonight.”
“I decided to try for Dutch courage,” he said. “I may want a rematch in sexual grappling, and fear I am outclassed.”
“So,” she said dubiously, “tell me more about yourself.”
The Irish coffee, with whipped cream floating on top, was served in a glass cup. Claire held up her half-filled glass, suggesting a third could be brought at Jeanne’s convenience.
“Plus, I feel I should explain myself. This is an awfully good Reuben. Stacks of corned beef. Good Thousand Island dressing.”
“Helpful to know,” Claire said.
“It’s hard to know where to start.”
“Pick a place. Any place,” she suggested. “I’ve been a lot of things in my life, and no one ever judged me. At least, not that I know of. Tell me about your grandfather.”
“Right,” he said. “When you get back to the cabin, look above the bed where you slept. There’s a leather hanging, pretty timeworn, that I framed in glass. The words burned into it read ‘Maintiens le Droit.’
“My grandfather was tall. Spare. A good-looking man who golfed his age or bet
ter into his nineties. Strong facial features, craggy nose and jaw. He was born in England, but according to a family rumor, had been sent to Canada after having compromised a girl. That was easy to do then, without legal birth control. Lambskin condoms are still popular, but they aren’t always effective. His family had money; they would have sent the girl to France to have the child. They sent him away and made his scant inheritance conditional on his not returning to the continent.
“He was a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which is where ‘Maintiens le Droit’ came from. Then, when he had a family, he went to work for a lumber company, when no one thought second-growth white pine could disappear. When the old forests were gone, the value of land bottomed out, but he bought property when everyone else was selling. He had a home and property on the Main Branch for a while, near Lake Margrethe, but he sold almost everything when prices went up.”
“Why do you think he kept the cabin?” Claire asked.
“I don’t know,” Charles admitted. “Maybe it reminded him of his days in the Canadian Mounted Police.”
“Can’t you just call him a Mounty?”
“Not properly, no. He was, in spite of his faux pas with the girl in England, a man concerned with maintaining the right as best he could. When he was in Canada, he had to go track down a man who’d killed someone in a bar fight. He found the man, who’d fled drunk into a snowstorm. My grandfather, who wasn’t armed, found him in his tent, lifted the tent flap, and said, ‘Joe, it’s time to come home.’”
“What happened?”
“Joe and my grandfather walked back to town.” Charles took a sip of his drink. “My own father had no interest in staying in the north. He took his share of my grandfather’s money to Indiana, where he started a chain of restaurants. My sister Mary, who I was close to as a child, took over his original restaurant, so Dad left her his money when he died a few years ago. Mary offered to share her inheritance with me, but nowadays, restaurant chains are risks, and her husband’s a little iffy. I like to know she’s got money in a bank. In another state.”
“No other women in the family of interest?” Claire asked.
“My grandmother died in childbirth when my father was born. My own mother, who I remember as elfin and charming, parted with my father when I left for Columbia. She accompanied me there, dropped me off, made sure my trunks were taken in, and moved to Italy with a widower she met on the train. We got a few postcards from her, in her inimitable handwriting, saying she loved us all, but that we should remember ‘pure passion’ doesn’t often arise in midlife.”
“That sounds incredibly unfeeling and mean,” Claire said.
“My father never discussed it. I’m not sure how much he missed her. Her leaving was harder on Mary than me. Mother had always wanted to be a socialite. She and I didn’t have much in common.”
“But you’re all right, financially?” Claire asked. “If you weren’t, would Mary help you?” George had not left her filthy rich, but her attorney said their portfolio would keep her comfortable, even if medical insurance went through the roof.
“I’m all right. I have enough to do what I want to do.”
“What do you want to do?” Claire fidgeted. She’d tried to get Charles talking, but so far, she had no idea why she was sitting here, at this restaurant, asking for the story of his life. Her chicken sandwich was good, as were the salad and sweet potato fries, but the sand caught in her underpants—she thought she’d powdered adequately—was making her edgy. She tugged at the elastic that rimmed her conservative panties.
When her third drink came, she concentrated. She could almost meditate by sucking her drink through the straw and then blowing a stream of bubbles down around the olives. The pickle complicated the effort. She handed it to Charles, but he put it down and looked at her.
“I’ve only wanted to do one thing in my life, besides loving a woman I loved long before I met you. I would have liked to go on doing that. I want a life that lets me keep learning. I did publish my dissertation when I graduated Columbia, and that was released as a book—Feather Findings—documenting pesticide evidence in generations of birds that have nested, or still nest, in the same or nearby sites. Clever title, I think. Sounds cheerful. That book is how I can make Ed, and other homeboys up here, leave me alone. ‘Professor’s workin’, let ’um concentrate,’ they say. It’s also how I can justify a meal out, gas for the truck Ed and I share, and the occasional haircut.”
He looked over his glasses at her. His frames were crooked, riding up on one side of his face. He also had Thousand Island dressing smeared on one lens. She thought about reaching across the table and straightening his glasses and wiping the salad dressing off, but thought about the phrase he’d used—a woman I loved. She reached down and readjusted the fit of her shorts.
“They’d resent you if they knew you didn’t need to make money?”
“They wouldn’t resent me, but they would be different. I like hearing their stories. Stories they wouldn’t share as easily if they thought I didn’t need to work. They talk about winters they remember when snow came up to the windows of two-story houses, and of tunneling from house to barn. Logging small, hilly properties with horses. Not getting friendly with men who beat tourists to death.”
“Wait,” Claire said. “Who what?”
“‘Crushed a guy’s skull,’” Charles said. “Think clan loyalties. There aren’t many jobs here, and some of the people who stay are like the infamous Cornish pirates who lured ships onto the rocks with lights and beat survivors to death. I’ve heard it said that not everyone who comes from ‘down below’ surfaces again.”
Claire checked the level of Charles’s Irish coffee. Not that much gone. “So, you love this place, with its dog-chasing, off-road vehicles and chop shop cutthroats?”
“I do love this place. I virtually went into hiding here, during one part of my life. I realized I slowed down here. Thought more. Listened better. Remembered better. And most of the people here—most of the off-road riders, too—you could trust with your life.
“But anger builds when land gets played out. Can’t fish it, farm it, or mine it. There are logging companies here, but they don’t need the number of people they used to. They’ve got machines that move through forests like Transformers. The machine cuts off a tree at the base and picks it up easy as a man plucks a toothpick out of a toothpick glass. People could move where jobs are, and some do, of course, but it’s hard to move Grandpa and Grandma in the back of a Toyota. People from down below buy land and build summer houses three or four times as big as an ordinary house. Folks who’ve lived here three generations get bitter. And if you’re going to strip a truck, who better to help than your cousin? It’s not just here. It happens all over the world.”
“What was the land here originally? Ojibwa?”
“Their villages were more in southwest Michigan. Ojibwa and Ottawa—Odawa, they’d say—did have villages near here, but they moved around more, fishing and harvesting wild crops.”
“Mister Authority,” she said. “You do remind me of George. Sometimes talking to him was like reading the center column of The Wall Street Journal.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said. “Though I bet George’s knowledge was organized in columns.”
“I bet you hate malls.”
“I shop in small stores when I can. There’s been talk about a Costco store in Grayling that’s at least, for the most, part employee-owned. Leelanau Books, in Leland, has a great selection of new books, and First Edition too, in Moran, is a terrific used bookstore.”
“So, what the hell were you doing in San Diego?”
“Remember what I said about the love of my life?”
“I need another drink.”
Charles waved for the server again, and Jeanne came over.
“Another Irish coffee and another Bloody Mary?”
“You will have had four Bloody Marys,” Charles marveled. “You could drink Bluto, from Popeye, r
ight under the table.”
“The love of your life? Is she the woman in the picture on the bedside table?”
He gave her a long look. “Let’s get the bill with this round of drinks,” he said. “We may be having an actual conversation. I want to be able to remember what we said.”
Claire looked abashed. “I do too, actually. I think, Charles, I’m going to remember everything you’ve said.”
They drank their last drinks in relative silence, eavesdropping on other people in the bar. A group of older people, mostly gray-haired and in motorcycle clothes, was discussing the pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron join.
When the bill came, Charles insisted on paying.
“You fed me trout,” Claire said.
“You drove. And I want to over-tip.”
“You buttering up Jeanne?”
“She’s got a kid with an immune system disorder. Jeanne’s husband’s insured, but her working here helps them pay for medicine not covered.”
Claire stopped at the restroom on her way to the car. She checked her hair in the mirror while she was washing her hands, and thought briefly about brushing it out, which she always would have done with George. This is ridiculous, she thought. This is Charles.
Then she brushed her hair.
“Want to drive around and talk?” Charles asked, and Claire did.
Charles drove west, past the cut-in for the cabin, and after a brief time on M-72, turned northwest between red pines and onto a sandy logging road.
“Lane Delaney,” he said. “We were lovers through our graduate work at Columbia. She was a serious musician then, and now plays cello in the London Symphony Orchestra. I saw her play, twice, when I was in England, and when I had articles published, she sent me congratulatory notes. We broke up because she wanted kids and I didn’t. Kids are fascinating, smart, alien beings, but they grow up to be people, and there are already too many people in the world.