We paused in our work and stared down the tree line, waiting for the dog to appear at the bottom of the gully, a black shape cast against the winter. “Stupid thing,” Nate said. “He’s off to find some shit to roll in.”
But then the lean figure appeared, head down and running fast, transmuted into an arrow of pure joy, his target the vole he chased through the underbrush. The dog’s body arced up and forward through the deep snow. The motion looked like swimming, the breaststroke maybe, and all that frozen land had become ocean. The black arrow vanished behind the trees, then appeared again even further out, part of that world now—the gulley and broken birch trees and moose trails—and definitely not mine. “That’s a dog who knows his own mind,” Nate said, and he shoved the boxes into the truck bed.
“It’s really going to come down,” I said, because the sky glowed dirty silver.
We were walking boxes back and forth from the cabin to the truck and I was wondering why I had waited so long into October to do the crazy thing I was doing. But the idea of waiting until summer rolled back around seemed even more crazy. Two troubled daughters waited for me in Seattle, one with a bad job, the other with a bad marriage, both with kids. We were going to be together for the first time in years. “I think it might, Mary,” Nate said, as he inspected the sky. “I wouldn’t be surprised anyway.”
He carried two boxes to my one, all books, all heavy, but he had a point to make. Fifty-six years old but he could still do this kind of thing. Broken-hearted too, from a recent difficult split, but that wouldn’t stop him. His face was still boyish, I decided, despite the mangy beard and dark circles, all the flaws I noticed when in a particular frame of mind. The dog shrank to a speck now, out where the telephone lines stretched over the hill and toward the city. Nate didn’t even bother calling after him. I said, “I’m a little worried.” But by my next trip to the truck the dog was back, right there in the driveway, his whole body shaking with triumph. It was one of Nate’s new dogs and I didn’t remember his name, so I just called him boy as I ran my hands up and down his body. I knelt and felt his warm breath against my face and I knew he had just killed something. “God,” I said. “You smell like death,” and I laughed.
He broke away from me and back down the hill.
I found Nate inside, sitting on a milk crate drinking black coffee from a paper cup, and I made a joke about his laziness, a second one about his dog, but I sat down too. I did the math in my head: six trips for each of us, six boxes for me, twelve for him, maybe twenty books in each box. I saw each book as a decision I had made. When taken together they were as definitive as a marriage or crime. This was a life of sorts and soon it would be somewhere else. “I’m going to sit down too,” I said, and I collapsed on the floor. My stomach was calling for something, anything, to fill it, but I had emptied out the pantry cabinets yesterday. Now there was nothing but some milk and cans of beer in the fridge, a box of Cheerios I would eat by the handful when driving. “We really should get some food,” I said.
Nate made a noise like it didn’t matter to him one way or another. “You’re going to like it there,” he said after a while.
“This from the man who thinks every state in the union but two are hell-holes.”
“And Hawaii is on its way too,” he said, and then, when I just smiled instead of laughing, “Did I ever tell you about the time I spent on the Big Island?”
“Of course you did,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “That long-haired guy out there, I must have told you about him, the one who played the guitar and sang those songs about fish and birds? Christ, he was amazing. Except for the songs. Birds. Always with the birds. But I would have done anything for him.”
His face had sharpened, grown younger, and I knew he had remembered something. A kind of accident of the mind, the equivalent of finding a folded dollar bill on the sidewalk. “From the sounds of it you did,” I said, and he grunted, just like before when I had asked him if he was hungry.
“And then I wrote him that letter.”
This surprised me. I had never heard about any letter.
I said, “Yeah, the letter,” because I didn’t want to put even the smallest ripple into this perfect little moment. He added something about it being a different time back then, when people actually sat down and placed their thoughts on paper, one after another. There was something fantastic about that, even when those thoughts were designed to maim. He made a motion with his hand as if placing each thought carefully on the empty air. He was trying to be funny again, sort of, but also serious. He had a way of living in both of those places simultaneously, like a lot of men I knew and had known. I had never understood it, not as way of being, not as a survival tactic even, but it could be endearing. I said, “I’ve never done anything like that. I don’t think I have it in me.”
“Too nice.”
“Too lazy.”
The snow had come. I noticed it over his shoulder through the cabin window. The truck cap was open and the boxes exposed. The dog had probably charged back down into the gulley or was just now hurtling out of it. Nate smiled and said something about the letter again. Apparently, he had found an old wound, or some combination of old wound and funny story, that he wanted to pick at. He said, “Once you know someone for about a year, that’s when you have all the ammunition you need. That’s all it takes. One year.” A shadow had moved across his face but he was grinning, and I wondered if he was in pain. I had suddenly remembered him telling me, a few years before, about a bad back, how he was always pushing through soreness when chopping wood or even bending over his truck engine. This forgetting seemed like a pretty horrible thing to do, but at least I was patient as he tried to remember the words he had used in the letter. One of them was compromiser, another thief, because of a missing jacket. Worse than that. Talentless Faggot. Wannabe rock star. A bad driver, a bad lay, a bad cook. A hypocrite. A folk singer.
“Yeah,” I said. “I never did anything like that. How long was it?”
“We dated for about a year.”
“No,” I said. “The letter.”
“God,” he said. “It went on and on. Ten pages.”
“It was a gift,” I said. “It settled the deal. You showed yourself to be an asshole. It made everything easier for him.”
He made his little grunting sound for a third time.
“I never thought about it that way before.”
“Wait,” I said. “I do have a story like that.” I didn’t know if it was a good idea or not, sharing it, or just another rash decision like moving here, like moving back, but I decided, then and there, that an occasional rash decision could keep the blood pumping, and so I told him, “It was with my ex-husband.”
“I figured,” he said. “The famous painter.”
“And the physical therapist.”
“Sure,” he said. “His new muse.”
“He wasn’t really famous until much later,” I said. I didn’t know why that seemed important except that I remembered many long talks about money, bills spread on the kitchen table. I had been working part-time as a schoolteacher and trying to paint myself, little studies of rocks and trees laid down on small squares of canvas and then stacked in the pantry with my other projects: empty canning jars, gardening tools, knit blankets, and scarves.
“I wonder if they’re still together?” Nate asked. I had told him about them before, of course, at first as jokes at their expense, and then the jokes changed and I became the target, my innocence in the face of hard realities. And then the humor drained away and it all became serious, after we had moved through a whole cycle of seasons in Alaska and Nate had lost a lover to cancer. Walking through the hill trails I looked straight ahead and told him the details like I was reciting them from a page tugged fresh from the typewriter. I was still feeling the effects, more than two years later.
We sat there and I considered pushing myself into motion, back to the boxes and then to the chairs, the kitchen table, the rugs rolled up and stacked along the wall. The snow outside had picked up, but it was nothing terrible. I knew it could stop as quickly as it started and leave the world outside transformed by whiteness. A bad time to be leaving the state though, all things considered. I said, “Talentless. That was never the problem with Jason. Too much talent. That was an issue.”
But now I was fumbling. I said, “I don’t know how to explain it,” and then I tried to explain it. Even as I opened my mouth I knew it would come out wrong, but I reminded him about things I had told him before: the series of affairs, the occasional crying confession, and then Jason’s busted ankle and his weekly visits to the physical therapist, where light exercise and ice packs evolved into lust and love. A woman fifteen years younger than me and four inches taller. I remembered her bouncing ponytail as she jogged around our small town.
She was the last one in the series, and it did not seem like love so much as a switching of allegiances from one infidelity to the next, as if all those other women had been betrayed too. Also, a compromising of his values, because the others had been intellectuals, chain-smokers, a sculptor, a photographer, a woman with a history of mental problems. I would stop at a traffic light and suddenly this girl would be there, ponytail bouncing, running in place at the crosswalk, looking both ways and then off again and out of sight. I allowed myself to imagine her body naked, stepping into the shower, her mind even and clear from her runner’s high, hurt and guilt burned away as easily as calories.
Nate matched those details with his own. He remembered the paintings filling the living room, what would have been our living room if not for the paintings, the sheer desperation in them. This was before Jason’s work grew smaller and more refined. Would they embarrass him now, or would he just see them as a necessary stage?
Nate had seen none of these but he knew them through my eyes.
“You know how hard I worked to stay friends with him,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “For the kids.”
I took a breath and decided that this was it. “I still had keys to the old house,” I said. “It had been almost a year, but I still had a few things there. My paintings, mostly. I had abandoned them. We’d have coffee in the kitchen sometimes and talk about art and he’d say, hey why don’t you take a painting back with you, and I’d always say no. Then he’d keep talking about this or that. Like a teacher talking to a student, I guess. That’s what we had become.”
“I can’t imagine you that way,” Nate said.
“That’s the way I was. I was content with that, with being that person. At night the girls and I would sing and read books aloud in our new house. We painted the walls bright colors.”
I considered what I thought of as the old house. Those walls had been brightly painted too. I hadn’t been aware of it at the time, but I had tried to duplicate it. I said, “I couldn’t bring the barn with me though. I told you about that barn. Falling apart, but it was beautiful.”
“Sure,” he said, and I remembered the sight of it on the horizon, splintered open and leaning to the south like the dogwood trees. The barn led me to the other memory of destruction, and I withheld it for a moment, recalling the weight of the porch boards underneath my feet. It had been raining lightly and my hair was damp, my glasses speckled with water. Jason and his young bride were nowhere to be found. I knew she had an apartment on the other side of the valley.
“So you went there,” he said. “What for?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just found myself there. I’m serious. I just wanted to talk to him.”
“And then what did you do?”
“I went inside.”
I could have told Nate that I was outrunning myself, as a desperate attempt at improvement or just to see how it felt to be her. I could have told Nate that I was bringing by a small gift, because I did do that sometimes, as a spur of the moment thing, or when I was lonely. I would have looked equally ridiculous in running shorts and sneakers and a wet sweatshirt or holding a tinfoiled brick of banana bread. But I didn’t remember. I was there as I often was and they were not.
The door was unlocked. I stepped into the living room.
Nate smirked. Now we were getting to the good part.
I remember running water from the tap, tilting my head sideways and bending and drinking. It seemed wrong to open a cabinet and remove a cup. I remember walking to the back of the house and staring down that hideous barn. When I returned to the living room I noticed new paintings, no more than sixteen inches across, all browns and yellows. I’d like to say that I saw something in them, and that’s what caused me to do what I did next, but who knows? Once when I was small my friends, two neighborhood girls, and I had pulled back a large rock from the earth and found a centipede, writhing as if in pain, though I knew it wasn’t in pain, that pain was something it might not even experience, at least not in the way I knew it. We took turns jabbing at it with sticks, turning it over the way a person might an egg, the way I had seen my mother turn eggs, with the slenderest attention. Then we poked the sticks deeper until the writhing mass became two pieces, then three. This was like that. There was no feeling in it, just a methodical sense of obligation. That was the right word. It was something that needed to be done. This is the only feeling I can find in my past that corresponds to the feeling of moving through that house. “I wasn’t angry,” I told Nate, although he looked skeptical. But it was true.
I was ready to stop right there.
I think his silence urged me on. If Nate had said a single word I would have said that’s that and gotten back to work, laughed the whole thing off. But he didn’t, so I pushed myself into the silence, like I was talking to myself. “You’re not going to believe this,” I said.
I could only recall what happened next as an outsider. I am that person, of course, but I also wanted to believe that I was someone else, and that the person telling the story had very little to do with the person in it. The person in the story, she was watching the barn. She was looking at the new paintings and then she was rifling through the cabinets. The pots and pans clattered as she pulled them out. That made everything else easier.
Nate wore his usual smirk but he was silent.
I told him about the jars of spice. I emptied them into the sink and then dropped them to the tile. The glass was thick enough that they didn’t shatter. They broke apart like eggs into two or three pieces and then I picked up the shards and dropped some of them. I told him about the gardening gloves I found in the back room, my old gardening gloves, which I put on as I tore the curtains from the dining room windows. “Fingerprints,” I explained.
“Crazy,” he said.
The story had its own gravity now. All I had to do was keep going, let myself be drawn to its weight.
“Get this,” I said. “I’m not making this up. On the VCR there was a videotape. A tantric sex tape. It’s like it had been put there especially for me.”
He laughed and so did I and I told him about beelining through the house to the back where I found something new: a dog chain running from the back porch to the storage shed. It was being used as a clothesline. Two towels hung from it like white flags. I took one, balled it around it around my fist, and smashed the back-door window, first just one pane but then the rest, six, seven, eight, nine. I made sure to stand outside and smash the glass inward. I was thinking that clearly.
“Oh God,” Nate said. “Wow. In your gardening gloves.”
“In my gloves,” I repeated.
“Are you trying to show me how tough you are?” he asked. “So I won’t be worried about you making this trip alone? Because I already know you’re a tough lady.” Half-joking, half-serious again, and I ignored it.
I pulled the cabinet from the wall and heard the plates clatter down, the silverware chime. Behind it was a small space where secret things gathered: dust, a few marbles, a paperclip, nothing that raised my interest except a piece of paper with phone numbers on it. No names, just the numbers, and so I returned it to the floor and then moved to the cabinet again. It took some shoulder muscle to get it up and against the wall again and when it did I walked to the kitchen, stood there at the sink and waited for the other moment, the moment back there in the dining room, to be over. “Then what?” Nate said. “Did you burn the place to the ground? Pee on the floor?”
“Yes,” I said. “I peed on the floor.”
“Christ,” he said. “Really?”
“Nate,” I said. “Of course not,” but why did I think that was so ridiculous? I did run a knife across the kitchen table and then push it through one of my own paintings. I spilled a bag of rice on the carpet, pushed over the TV, tugged the phone from the wall. And then, when I was finished, I stole one thing, the videotape—no, two things, the videotape and the hammer—and I used one to smash the other when I returned home. “It wasn’t satisfying,” I said. “I don’t know what it was.”
Nate fell back and made a deep whistle. What could he say?
“I’m not finished,” I said. “Two days later I got a call from the police.”
“Damn,” he said.
“My heart almost stopped. That was it. I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Try to describe it.”
“I don’t know how. But it was just a second, because this cop, he was extremely polite and concerned. He said, ‘There’s been a break in at Jason’s house. They stole some jewelry. They stole some money. What a world, huh?’”
“And then what?” Nate asked.
“That was it. We talked about other things. It was a small town and he was just calling to gossip. Checking up on me. Maybe he thought I’d find some pleasure in it? After the divorce there were men in that place who were interested in me. I’m not sure.”
“They liked you there in that town, didn’t they?”
“They did.”
“And Jason not so much,” he said. He seemed to consider the whole thing as he might contemplate something in a store, an expensive coat or a piece of furniture. He smiled and said, “And you told me you didn’t have a story.”
I didn’t know what to do with my hands so I put them on my knees.
Nate said, “You know what? Fuck it. I’m just going to tell you this. That letter, I never sent it. Okay? I wanted to but I didn’t. Jesus, Mary. I don’t know. What the hell. What the hell.”
He said it twice, what the hell, what the hell, and then he coughed. I told him that it was okay, not to worry about it, he was telling me now, right? I told him I understood completely.
Because there’s a part I didn’t tell him either, and not just an omission: a substitution, a hack’s magic trick, one card for another when nobody’s looking. It felt necessary to turn Jason into a certain kind of person, for the sake of the story. For my sake. So what about this? No video placed in plain sight on top of the television, and so no hammer smashing down, no satisfying splinter of plastic. Which is not to say that tapes like this didn’t exist. A number of them could have existed somewhere in the house, under the bed or in a drawer or even unnoticed out in the open. Certainly, there had been tapes like this when we had lived together, a couple I found ridiculous in their mix of spirituality and depravity, and one which I quite enjoyed. We both enjoyed it, had purchased it together actually, and so I called it up from my memory as if at the end of a long, gray rope and then placed it in my old house, my new story. I held it in my mind like a treasure, then I smashed it to bits and watched Nate’s smile.
A substitution. Because I was not afraid, not rushed very much at all. I spent more than an hour in that house and when the cabinet was pulled from the wall and the dishes shattered on the floor, I wasn’t finished. I moved upstairs and found the unmade bed, the sheets and blankets pushed to the bottom, a pillow on the floor, and I paused before picking it up and placing it back on the bed. Stupid, of course, considering the destruction downstairs, but that’s what I did, and then I sat on the bed’s edge and then I reclined and looked at the ceiling, up through the skylight and through the dark.
Possibly I was waiting for them to return and the shock—the punishment—that meeting would bring. There would be a scene. There would be consequences.
After a while I moved to standing again and made my way to the bathroom, where I washed my hands, listening to the reassuring sound of water in the porcelain. I was coming back to the world, or at least I was able to pretend that’s what I was doing. I stood at the mirror behind the sink and noticed the water stains and flecks of toothpaste. I don’t remember my own reflection, although of course that must have been there, a serious face: impenetrable even to myself. I found the latch and the mirror became a door leading even deeper into their private lives: bottles of shaving cream and dental floss and an arrangement of medications. So many medications actually, each with Jason’s name, one for depression and one for anxiety and one for the side effects of the first. This was new to me. One read, take one hour before conducting sexual activity. The word conducting, that would have made Nate laugh, the image of waving arms, a tuxedo, a pompous crown of gray hair. The orchestra rising in volume. But I held all that back. Instead I said, “This is the thing. Months later we talked. Jason and I did. I was giving him a gift for his birthday, just a little trinket, just expensive enough not to be insulting, and we were standing on the porch. I’d like to say it was my first time back since the incident, but it wasn’t. We had eaten lunch there a couple of times and once I had dropped by unannounced to give him a different gift for some other occasion. Anyway, everything was repaired by then. In fact, they were building an addition at the side of the house. The workmen were pounding away at the frame but there were no voices, and I remember thinking that it was a little strange that there were so many people, four or five, and not a word between them. Jason took the gift from me, small enough that he could put it in his pocket and wrapped with the same care I had always spent on gifts, on the ones I would give and the ones he would give too, when we were together. I am sure he noticed that—I wanted him to notice that. He said thank you and then he stopped, he still hadn’t unwrapped the gift, and I could tell he was thinking hard about something.”
Nate stared at an invisible point on the floor but he was listening hard. His face was tight as if concentrating on some desolate thought, but I knew that at any moment that face could break into a grin. I looked at the floor too, trying to match up my gaze with his own, and I told him about Jason looking tan and fit. Maybe he had taken up running.
“He said, ‘Mary, last summer when we were away, was it you who broke in here?’
I gave him a look like, how dare you ask me something like that, and I said, ‘Jason, I’ve never lied to you. Never.’
I let that come to rest in the air. Then I added, ‘I did not break into your house.’
We measured each other, looking into each other’s eyes. My open face, my sensible haircut and conservative makeup. I don’t know what he saw. Finally he said, ‘Thank you for the gift,’ and he began to open it at one end.”
Nate was measuring me too. Everything had stopped.
“Christ,” he finally said, and he exhaled. He shook his head, greedy for more, and I could have kept going. But we returned to the heavy lifting. He picked up first one box, then another, went back for more. After a while he added, “And you told me you didn’t have a story to tell. Christ, Mary. That was a million times better than mine.”
He shouldered the boxes into the truck, shook them around until they angled just right against the others. I knew the story wouldn’t end with him. There would be a night with a new lover or an old friend—Nate had many of both—when the well of his own experience would go dry and he’d say something like, “There was this woman I knew. A really sweet little thing. I had never seen her angry.”
Which would miss the point, wouldn’t it? Because it was not a story about anger. But when that new person imagined my face they’d color it red with blind rage. I could see it that way so clearly that I wondered if I had lied to myself too. Nate said, “We’ve been good to each other, haven’t we? It’s been a good few years.”
“Sure,” I said. “What are you getting at?”
“Don’t know,” he said. He shrugged. But I knew. I looked deep into that face the way my husband had into mine and I could tell he was holding something back, a cold judgment usually reserved for people you read about in the paper. And as I assessed it the dog appeared again, bulleting toward us. I heard him before I saw him and then there he was, a noise exploding in the dark. He was past me before I thought, the dog, because I had forgotten that he was out there, forgotten everything out there. He threw himself across the snow and the sight of that black shape striking forward almost snakelike caught me and brought me back and maybe it was the dark or the snow but I was frightened of that place I found myself in. Not a place, really, but the slenderest position in between places. The dog rattled off into the woods again and Nate threw a few curses at him and then I was all the way back, squarely in the now. The crunch of snow, the sharpness of the frozen air, the heft of those last boxes—it felt like I might stay there forever. But all of this happened a long time ago. I pulled out of the driveway and the nameless dog chased me down the road, barking at my tires. Nate headed in his own direction and took my life with him, possibly to share with others or just keep for himself. By the next day I was already at the border, gloved hands gripping the steering wheel, jaw set tight. I took the possibility of danger and placed it to one side, like a meal I preferred to eat a little bit later, and pushed myself down the road for a few thousand miles.
An idiot’s journey. That’s what I think of it now, but I saw incredible things, and then I shared them with my daughters.