At the toll plaza, she takes Sailor out for a quick spin, puts him back in the car. “I will be three minutes, tops,” she tells him. “Don’t start barking like a maniac.”
In the ladies’ room, she’s washing her hands when she feels a swift sliver, a whippy little breeze touching what she has come to think of as her new exposure. She checks to see what’s reflected in the wall’s length of mirrors. Regular women, one old but dressed like a teenager, one with two small kids she’s trying to fit into a stall with her because they’re too young to be left alone. So, all in all, a normal roadside population.
Before that afternoon in December, she was blissfully myopic, unaware that she might need to look over her shoulder; or sideways, into doorways as she came up on them. Or to scan the mirrors in a restroom. She used to walk leisurely through parking garages, even deserted ones, even at night. She stopped to help when approached by strangers on the street wanting directions. Now a heavy velvet curtain has risen, revealing all around her a lively pageant of possible danger. She not only sees it, but feels it whispering over her skin, as though, even when she’s fully dressed, a fresh patch of nakedness has presented itself. The very peculiar thing is that this doesn’t make her frightened; rather, it enlivens her.
Back in the car, she drives up through southern Wisconsin, also through March. The bleakness adherent to the month is that although the Midwestern winter is past its most brutal stretch, everyone is by now beaten down, and late assaults land on what’s already bruised. A fresh cold snap holds no bracing novelty. Leftover snow is by now a pewter color that, on too many days, matches the sky. Eventually, though, at some point in March, winter gets broken. That happened yesterday. Today a watery sun hangs in a pale sky. Cate puts down all the windows so she and Sailor can smell the earth thawing on both sides of the highway.
After getting off I-90, Cate winds chaotically around Madison a little (“Recalculating. At your next opportunity, make a U-turn,” says the nonjudgmental WAZE voice) before finding Neale’s address. The apartment is on the third story of a tan brick building in a complex of maybe twenty units with a developer-generated, meaning-free name—Wainscot Village—a featureless box fronted by a parking lot with covered spaces.
“Come on,” she says to Sailor, opening the door on his side. “Time to get social.”
Vestigial blue salt crunches under her feet on the metal stairs that run between the sections of the building. Sailor lags behind, peeing on several of the bushes that form a sort of hedge between the lot and the building.
“Hey you!” she calls down to him and he focuses and follows.
When they get to the door, Cate hears big life on the other side. Different sorts of clatter. Plates and silverware. Cabinets snapping shut with light thwaps. Voices without clear words. Orders given and taken, then laughter. Inside, Neale and Joe and Claude are getting ready for her. It’s half past noon; lunch is assembling. And though the assembly is on her behalf, she pauses before pressing the doorbell. She fears that even with the door opened she will feel just as shut away from Neale, that this visit is a formality to firm up the lie that their friendship is still solid—a lie Neale has been heavily promoting ever since she decided to make this move. Cate hates these conversations.
She rings the bell and the door opens, revealing such a happy Neale—“Come in, come in, oh you look great”—pulling Cate by the hand.
Claude is working at the kitchen island, slicing hard-boiled eggs, then fanning the slices open, one to each plate of also-fanned lettuce leaves, next to small stacks of green beans. He looks up and smiles, flashing teeth blindingly white, endearingly crooked.
“Cate.”
He’s such a handsome guy, more so even than when he and Neale were together. Five years of meditation and organic gardening have left him sculpted in that yogi way and glistening with peace. He and Neale are wearing stretchy yoga outfits. They are, Neale explains, just back from teaching a Saturday afternoon couples class. Both of them are working at two local studios while they get their act together to open one of their own. Madison, they both think, is a town with deep, under-tapped yoga potential.
“He’s arranging our salads,” Neale explains. “Because he’s French. No careless tossing for them. Take off your parka, give it to me, do you want something to drink?” Cate was just about to grab a can of pop from the refrigerator, the way she always does. But then she remembers this is a different household. She tacks around, stays put, and says, “By ‘something to drink,’ do you mean a juice that’s bluish green?”
“I got diet ginger ale for you. I’m the perfect hostess. Do you want ice?”
“Why not?”
Neale grabs ice cubes out of the freezer, inadvertently putting herself in the way of Claude’s reach for something on a high cabinet shelf. He kisses her at the temple, just a brush of lips. For some reason, Cate didn’t factor romance into Claude’s return. She thought that part was all over for them, that the new arrangement was just about calming things down for Neale, and helping out with Joe. This doesn’t make Cate jealous exactly, but it does prompt a need to cheer herself up with a little schadenfreude, which means scanning all of the apartment’s terrible design elements.
Everything is tricky here, pretending to be what it’s not. Press-board cabinets with a “walnut” veneer. Formica in a “granite” pattern. White metal folding closet doors with a “wood” grain. Windows with plastic inserts to make the glass look paned. Everything removed miles and miles from the walnut forest and the Italian granite quarry and the old-world mullion shop. Although the apartment does exist in the physical world, it is in a way, virtual. The air is thin—warm and dry as it comes out of the floor vents. She can see that Neale has tried to overlay this bleak rental unit with domestic touches that wouldn’t have occurred to her back in her old house, where function was the only consideration, where form didn’t even bother to follow. Here, though, a fake fireplace has been filled with a grate and an arrangement of birch logs that will never be burned. On the far wall, though, a sliding glass door to a balcony reveals a real fire inside a small grill, which is currently aglow with coals. Claude goes out and slaps on two tuna steaks and sits on a bent lawn chair to oversee their progress from raw to raw-but-seared.
He knocks on the glass and waves Cate outside.
“We have, you see, a très belle vue du lac.” And he’s technically correct. A narrow strip of lake is definitely visible between two other apartment buildings jammed in closer to the water. Which is very still, the ice just having melted. Neale complained on the phone about the saws of local ice fishermen, saying she’d probably be bitching about the engines of powerboats in the summer. But today all is very blue and still.
Rationally, Cate understands Neale’s move. Everything she has done to put space and change between herself and the assault is understandable. Although Cate was there to save her, she was not reliably around once Blanks started sucking her away. Meanwhile, Neale couldn’t be alone—how could she be? So she got free of the city and her neighborhood and her house and her hovering parents, grabbed a husband out of marital retirement, and bolted with him in tow, and this is where she landed—a manageable town surrounded by farms and prairie.
Nonetheless, Cate hates the move and takes it as a personal rejection. And is jealous of Claude. Her strongest emotions are particularly resistant to reason. And because of this, they stick out, obvious and pathetic.
Sailor has gone off on his own mission, to find Joe. The two come back through the hallway, wriggling around each other in a comic way. Sailor loves who he loves.
Joe fills a bowl with water and sets it on the floor. Cate tells him, “I got you something, some Basinski you may not already have.” She pulls the album out of her backpack.
“Oh man, it’s the white vinyl Deluge. Look, Papa.” The accent is on the second syllable. Cate particularly hates when Joe gets all Frenchy with Claude. “Thanks, Cate.” He comes over and gives her a sideways hug, banging his hip against her. Something has pulled him closer to her, she’s not sure what.
“How’s it going?” she asks him. He has grown a little just in the few weeks since she’s seen him. He is sliding into his teens. He at first seems not to have heard her but then says, “It’s okay. Really. Different, but okay.” He’s a little diplomat; he wants everything to be okay again for his mother. Also, he’s thrilled to have his father back. He’s not thinking this might once again be a temporary situation. Claude has, in the past, followed up hugely interested with not so interested after all.
Claude puts the salads on the table. Neale gets out of the oven a loaf of that bread that’s almost baked and you just polish it off yourself. She tries to take it out barehanded, says damn, then drops it on the floor, then picks it up with a dishcloth as a potholder. Her hands are a tapestry of small suffering from pots of inadvertently spilled pasta water, thoughtlessly gripped oven racks and pot handles. It’s like she has this one, very specific cognitive delay. It’s too endearing. Cate feels a brimming at the back of her eyes.
Talk skitters around the table. Joe likes his new school here better than the one in Chicago except that it doesn’t have Kiera. He wouldn’t say he has friends yet, but no one is beating him up in minor, deviously non-bruising ways, which did happen in Chicago. The capricious and cruel tactics of the new administration, of course, drift into the conversation. (The only conversations within Cate’s earshot that don’t feature the president are those where a moratorium is imposed at the outset. “Let’s not talk about him today. It’s too depressing.”) At the moment, he’s trying to put in place a new travel ban, which is almost exactly the previous travel ban.
“I’m waiting for France to go on the list of banned countries,” Claude says. “We French are a danger to someone who likes his meat well-done.”
Neale wants to know about the new play Cate is working on, a futuristic romance Molly and Lauren are trying out in the summer on the Santa Barbara launchpad.
It’s a struggle for Cate, getting through the meal. It’s difficult eating lettuce, talking in an anodyne way about her work and not crying, all at the same time.
When they’re finishing up, a tour of the town is suggested, also a game of Clue, which is an old favorite.
“Just a minute,” Cate says, looking hard at the bowl of fruit Claude has set down in the middle of the table. “I think Sailor needs to go out. He just passed a smoke signal. I got him a burger at the rest stop.” A lie, but who will call her on it? She should be able to sit through this lunch and then have some fruit and a cup of Claude’s Marco Polo tea afterward, ask him about life in the ashram, listen with Joe to some of the Basinski album she brought, but she can’t.
“Back in a sec,” she says, then heads for her car. Sailor follows without question. Not questioning sudden changes in plans is one of the best features of dogs.
Neale doesn’t call Cate on her drive home. She won’t be happy about Cate’s escape, but she will get it.
They drive back on roads instead of highways, Sailor with his head out the window. When they are at a stop sign and Sailor sees three horses in a fenced-in field, he tries to climb out the window.
“If you want, we can go see them,” Cate tells him. “See what’s up.”
She waits with him by the fence until one of the horses, heather gray, dappled with deep brown spots, comes over and dips his head so he and Sailor can make each other’s acquaintance by twitching noses in the delicate air between their faces. Watching this, something pleated fans open inside her. The happiness of animals in a green field on a fine day, of course. But also a glimpse of the amount of information that can be given and received just by approaching without an already composed story, then holding still and paying absolute attention.