Something about our new condo puts me off. Maybe it’s this furniture. When Wilco accepted the deal at British Petroleum, I told him: let’s ditch that hodge-podge we’ve cobbled together in Houston and get new stuff.
Before escrow closed on this place, I ordered these new pieces, pared-down classics of modern design like I’d studied in art school. As I edge toward decrepitude, I crave the pristine line. It’s not about order but the lack of any sort of compromise.
Still, with the final piece, delivered just two weeks ago, Corbu’s famous lounger, I find its swoop isn’t as attractive as in the Bauhaus photographs, and the molded plywood Eames chairs appear smaller than they had in the Design Within Reach catalog, while Wilco’s leather armchair seems overscaled.
To really spoil the broth, in our one concession to the past, Wilco insisted I dust off some canvasses I’d painted in my twenties. A ghastly lot. To prod me on, he said. They hang reproachfully on one wall.
“Honey,” I say, “I want to rearrange the furniture.”
“David, again? I’ve just gotten used to the way you did it yesterday.”
Wilco slurps his coffee in his tall wingback. I can’t see him, only a hand and forearm that pounce now and then on the armrest. By disposition and because he used to lift weights every day, that forearm is solid, like the rest of him. I can almost see the seams of the chair pull apart under his weight, which is absurd, of course, given how tautly the Italians have stretched the white leather.
The armchair faces a set of glass doors that give out onto a deck, which in turn looks onto the jagged mountains at the easternmost edge of the town, a bright green wall in the early morning summer light.
“Complacency,” I say, “is the enemy of the good.”
“I thought it was perfection.”
“That, too.”
Wilco never holds out for long against my wishes. It’s his essential Scandinavian/Minnesotan go-along-to-get-along thing. Whatever, as my students used to say. Or as Wilco’s jolly father, a man with a nonetheless healthy sense of limits, might growl, just let me be to eat my lutefisk.
Boy, Wilco really puts his foot down this time: he insists the placement of his beloved wingback be left untouched by my interior desecrations.
“Fine,” I say. “We’ll make it the centerpiece—just like you, darling—the thing around which everything revolves.”
“You have to joke about everything.”
“J’accuse!” I say. “Really? And so early in the morning.”
“Everyone’s got to have a hobby. Mine’s golf, yours is hilarity, apparently.”
“Now who’s being funny?” I get off the red Ligne Roset couch and walk to the front of the living room to contemplate my first move. “Difference is,” I say, “I can practice my hobby all year. You can golf, what, two months in this godforsaken place?”
Snow on the ground all the way through April. Last February, Wilco took a promotion that required a transfer up here to the middle of nowhere (a.k.a. Anchorage, Alaska). I’d followed, dutifully, of course. Wither thou goest . . .
I tried then, as I do now, to look on the bright side. Wilco’s new salary is greater than our former incomes combined. He’s much too consumed by his new job to be interested in taking back on our, to me, onerous role as a civically minded gay couple always out and about for some cause. And I’m no longer required to work. I only had a couple years left to retirement anyway, and trying to cram a love of art down the throats of privileged youth had lost its allure. What remained was a workmanlike quality, a sense of accomplishment that I gave up.
In recompense, the plan was for me to return to painting, to pick up my glorious career where I’d left off. But since unpacking the brushes, I haven’t so much as picked one up. I find the habit of art has atrophied. Forty years is a long time. One backslides. One becomes someone else.
Now I mostly rearrange furniture. Also, like my mother, I watch daytime TV. I’ve become personal friends with any number of fictional characters on the soaps. Especial favs: Wyatt Spencer, and, even though he’s a devious shit, Victor Adam Newman Jr., who’s très gay and has the cutest set of boyfriends he abuses. I try not to yell at the bitch, but really, sometimes it’s not possible.
“Five months,” Wilco says, returning to the subject of golf. “A guy at the club told me you can play up here five months.”
“Four, I think. Unless you want to tee up with icicles.”
“At least it gets me out of the house.”
“I walk to the mailbox every day.”
“Except you drove the half block last winter.”
“It was minus twenty degrees!”
“Only for a couple weeks. Otherwise, the temp was around zero.”
“Are you listening to yourself?” Wilco’s attempts to prove himself right are so infantile. “We could have stayed in Houston where it’s warm, but no. Wilco has this thing for Alaska.”
I say this too pointedly. My humor has always bordered on the acid. Plus, though I’ve soured on this move, I’ve promised myself not to harp on it. What’s done is done.
“That’s okay, hon.” I slip into my old West Texas accent to soften the effect and speak to the back of Wilco’s big chair. “You sit there and look purdy while Momma fixes up the house. Admire your precious Great Land out that big ole winder.”
I move the Corbu lounger a foot to the left halfheartedly, pick up one of the molded plywood chairs and set it back down. I sigh theatrically. I collapse on the couch, bury my face between the cushions, and breathe in that new leather smell.
Immediately, I think of my father’s Cadillacs he bought every third year. He was a pious, self-important man who discouraged frivolity or release through the senses. Those cars were for his personal use or for important family occasions. When he allowed us to ride in them, we had to sit, hands folded, quietly in the back. We couldn’t eat or drink or chew bubblegum or our mother smoke her menthols or wear her fabulous Shalimar cologne. So that new car smell lasted longer than was natural. It always made me sad when I realized it was gone.
“I thought you were getting the place ready for Architectural Digest.”
“I was thinking of my father.”
“You know how that upsets you.”
“It’s my form of self-flagellation. In this, he and I are not so far apart.” I finger the corner of the book he’s been studying on local hiking trails. These hold no interest to me, but there’s a chapter in the back on arctic ecology I find intriguing. “Are your mountains pretty today, honey?”
“I’m doing a crossword puzzle.”
“Mind-rotting piffle.”
“It beats rummaging through your past and making yourself unhappy. You have to know things to fill out crosswords.”
“You have to know everything to make yourself unhappy about your past.”
Out the glass doors, shadows of fluffy summer clouds smudge the mountains. A sliver of lake sparkles in the gap between the houses on the opposite side of the road. A group of ravens persecutes a bald eagle in a midair ballet. Who would think we’d live in such a place? Wildlife out our window nearly every day! We might as well be camping out. I loved Houston. The only thing sauvage there was traffic and the lack of zoning regulations.
“Come on,” I say, resigned to the prospect of a little physical exertion. He’s bound to bring up the subject eventually. “We don’t get nice days like this often. How about a walk in your precious mountains?”
“Promise not to complain?”
I reach the book on hiking trails around the corner of the chair and drop it. “Pick something easy, please.”
The thunder’s repeated retort is muffled by the distance. From what I understand, there’s almost never lightning in Anchorage—too cool, too close to the water—but the big towers to the north loom and spark over flatlands wedged between rows of mountains.
“Don’t you love global warming?” I fan my face with my Astros baseball cap. “I’d be miserable in Alaska without it.”
“When all that carbon gets released from the tundra, there’ll be water way up here.”
We’re on a promontory off the trail, high above the only road between Anchorage and the communities to the south, on the Kenai Peninsula.
“Look on the bright side,” I say. “We could both get jobs as gondoliers.”
Voices of hikers on the trail grow louder. A man in his early twenties bounds through the gap in the trees to join us on the rock. A woman, also young, follows a minute behind him.
“Wow, look at that,” the young man says. “Awesome.”
After some initial chit-chat, I nail them. If nothing else, my years as a teacher trained my powers of observation with young people. And though I’m a cheechako, a tenderfoot in Alaska, this Sean from Ohio exhibits that soft, doe-eyed idealism I’ve been warned about, of people new to this place who make a religion out of the beneficence of nature. Already this summer, one of them has died not far from here, in sight of the road below, people speeding along the black line to their comfortable houses.
His girlfriend, Samantha, seems to practice a sharp-eyed idealism. Hers is a no-nonsense orientation, driven no doubt by a tedious need to be precise. With the two of them, Wilco and I find ourselves huffing up the trail, at her exhortation.
Immediately, I’m out of breath.
“We’ll put you up front,” Samantha says. “A group can only go as fast as its slowest member.”
“I used to be so fit,” I say.
“Sucks to be old.”
“Gee, thanks, Wilco. I needed to be reminded of that.”
“How old are you, anyway?” the young man asks me.
“Sixty-two, sixty-three.”
“That old, it’s hard to keep track,” Wilco says.
He steps on the back of my boots and I stumble. I’m starting to feel irked by his niggling. He’s ingratiating, over-eager around young people. I’ve given up pretending to have much in common with them, but Wilco hasn’t relinquished the attachment to his youth.
“Compared to them,” I bring him back down to earth, “even you’re practically ancient. He’s forty-six, by the way.”
“Wow!” Sean said. “Same age as my dad.”
“The cranky Luddite.”
“Sam likes to use big words. She thinks I don’t know what they mean. I got a 740 on my verbals, you know.” Sean’s deep voice assails us from behind. “Actually, my dad is kind of a drag. He thinks iPads mean the end of civilization. Wouldn’t let me play computer games until I was fifteen. Made me take up reading. Sort of stunted my growth, I think.”
“Me,” I say, “I prefer videos about ginkgoes. Wilco here is interested in unusual stories about bugs.”
“Cool. I dig the Nature Channel.” Judging by his earnest reply, the boy hasn’t picked up the concept of irony from his Harry Potter books. “Samantha’s an artist. She prefers ambiguity.”
“Knowing things gets in the way,” she says.
Ambiguity: I may have misjudged the girl. “Sounds like something you’d put on your tombstone,” I say while gasping for breath. “Which art form?”
“I’m studying painting at Antioch. That’s where we met.”
Roots washboard the path and slow our pace. Wheezing, bent over, I stand to one side, too overcome to express my interest. “You all go on ahead,” I say. “I’ll catch up in a bit.”
“It’s hot,” the young man says. “I think I’m pretty much going to leave my shit here, pick it up on the way back.” Sean strips off his long-sleeved shirt and ties it around his waist. He pulls a small bag from his pack and slings it over his shoulder, then tosses the pack out of sight in a clump of fiddleheads.
My eyes trace the tight arcs of the young man’s chest, then down the vein that protrudes from his bicep. There are photos that tell me I was once this delectable, but I’d been too wrapped up with school and my puny art career to take much advantage of it. At the sight of this boy, absolutely at the height of his beauty, fidgeting with the bag’s straps, practically chomping at the bit to get started up the trail, desire mingles with regret.
“There’s another overlook a couple of minutes ahead,” Wilco says. My man has done his homework about the trail; I’ll give him that. “We can rest there.”
“Right on.” The young man retrieves his pack from the clump of ferns and dangles it from a shoulder.
I sigh and we move on.
“This is what you wanted,” Wilco says.
“I’ve told you before, feel free to correct me when I’m so clearly mistaken.”
“Come on,” Wilco says, ignoring the pointedness of my remark. “Just a couple more feet, honey-bunch.”
Honey-bunch gets me every time. I straighten, wedge my hands into my pockets, and plod up the path with a renewed vigor that proves all too momentary. The hill quickly bests me. I feel weary in body, but in spirit also. This jaunty little outing of ours can’t belie the fact that I feel old, as well as adrift in retirement. Worse, isolated in that house, I’m beginning to look for advice on what to do about this from my soap opera friends. In my situation, how would Suzi or Kendall plot their next move? Whatever it was, it’d be bold. It’d be beautiful.
The pièce de résistance to this little pity party: my boot slides into the deep socket of a tree root. I hear a pop and find myself face forward on the ground, blood streaking from my nose and a stabbing pain at my ankle.
“Whoa, dude! You okay?” The young man hurries over and lifts me by the armpits to a standing position. Gently, as if I were a decorative porcelain egg.
“Ai yai!” I put weight on my damaged foot.
Sean hands his pack to his girlfriend and crouches. “Jump on.”
As he waits for me to mount, the muscles of his back glisten with sweat. I wrap my arms around his shoulders, and with my good foot hop on. He smells of skunk and cooked cabbage. As we pass Wilco, I lean my face against the ropy muscle at the young man’s neck and flutter my eyelids seductively.
Samantha coils a spongy Ace bandage around my foot with a gravitas that makes me think of mummies, she the Egyptian priestess wrapping me, having first placed my organs in a jar. My foot is blue and swollen. When she finishes, I elevate it on my pack and lean back on my elbows to take in the view.
Sitting on the rock a little distance from the young woman, solid as a fireplug, Wilco pulls on his shades to shield him from the sunlight reflected off the inlet.
Samantha returns the First Aid kit to her pack, then slides out a sketchpad and a clear plastic box of pencils. She traces on a page the line of mountains opposite us, patches of snow clinging to their sides like wayward jigsaw puzzle pieces. Below, the watercourse at low tide veins the mud flats.
The young man plops down beside me and motions to the mountains with his chin. “Friggin’ gorgeous, man. Bet you don’t get tired of that.” He takes out of his bag an Altoids tin held closed by a rubber band. “You all get high?”
As an art student, I smoked up regularly with my fellows on the roof outside our third floor studio. Our laughter echoed off the building where the Philistines studied business administration.
Sean pulls a small pipe from the tin. “Dude, this is some major shit, so go easy. Scored it from a guy playing frisbee golf in a park in downtown Anchorage. I walked right up to him and asked.”
Stubble stipples the young man’s square jaw. His eyes are sunk into deep sockets under overhanging brows. His straight nose, the axis of a perfect bilateral symmetry, is bounded by high cheekbones. It’s the stereotypical beauties I crave. That’s why I like the soaps. There are no plain people.
“Sean changed his major from art history to business,” Samantha says, looking first at the mountains and then at her pad. “Now he thinks he’s a man of action.”
Sean flicks the lighter and holds it over the pipe bowl. “Doing stuff is where it’s happening. Nobody gives a shit about art history, Samantha.”
I hadn’t pegged him for a Philistine, but people are often less than they seem. I could take his remark as a rebuke, except that it was so obviously aimed at the young woman. Besides, I’ve long ago become resigned to my own insignificance. The world belongs to people like this young man and Wilco, entrepreneurs and engineers, makers of the tangible, the useful.
Samantha draws a large X across the sketch of the mountains, tears the sheet from the pad, balls it up, and throws it in a clump of alders.
“Hey, Sam. That’s not cool.”
“Biodegradability,” she says. “Nobody had to invent that. It just is.”
“Dude,” Sean says as he stands. “I think this is where I’m supposed to go pee.” He whistles some song unknown to me as he disappears into the bushes.
I take a long toke and then pass the pipe to Samantha. After a puff, she taps Wilco on the shoulder and hands him the pipe. Another round of smoke and I feel like a head without a body.
“You two are together, right?” Samantha asks, suddenly stoner serious.
I readjust my foot on the pack and laugh.
“I didn’t want to assume,” she says.
“On account of the difference in our age?”
“I thought it might be impolite.”
I’m impressed. One doesn’t often find a sense of propriety among the young.
“Fifteen years, now,” I say, “since we first met. It used to feel like only yesterday.”
Wilco turns and gives me one of his eat-shit looks that are not to be taken seriously. Still, I know to tread lightly.
“And you,” I say, “how long have you guys been together?”
Samantha strikes a straight line across the middle of the page: the water’s edge under the mountains. “I don’t think we are together, not really. I’m not sure I want that anymore.”
“And him?”
“It’s like the Magic 8 Ball app on my iPhone: reply hazy, try again.”
“So much of life is that way.”
Samantha nods. In her altered state, she seems to think this profound, whereas I was only repeating what Pamela “Pam” Douglas said last week on One Life to Live.
She rips the sheet from the pad and tucks it in the back. She looks at me with a singular concentration and draws with a pencil across a fresh sheet a curve that twins the outline of my head. I still myself and assume a three-quarter profile pose, that of a wise Socrates in the presence of his adoring Alcibiades. Wrong gender, I know, but a pleasant image nonetheless.
She sketches quickly, glancing back and forth from my face to the pad cradled in her lap.
“You have the touch,” I say, glancing at her progress. “The facility of line, I used to tell my students.”
“Your students?”
“Forty years an art teacher.”
She works hard to draw the shape of my shoulders. She holds the pencil like she might break it.
“You might loosen the line a bit. It’s all about breath, really. Precision in art does not result in merit.” I look back to the inlet and resume my pose.
“I bet you were a good teacher.”
“That wasn’t the plan, you know. I studied painting at university as well. After I got out, I rented this sweet house in the country and painted every day. I wasn’t without recognition: some awards, grants. I never could get paid though. It was my father’s idea to double-major in education. Something to fall back on.”
She shades the shadowed side of my face. I hear the pencil scrape across the rough paper. “I’m down with that,” she says.
I risk over-sharing, like you sometimes can when you’re stoned and with people you’re never going to see again. “Thing is, I gave up painting, but I never stopped thinking about myself as a painter. The teacher stuff was supposed to be temporary.”
“I wonder,” Wilco says, “if we shouldn’t get you back home and ice up that foot.” He uses his business voice, plainly displeased by my Kumbaya moment with this stranger.
Just then there’s a rustling in the bushes, and the young man strides back onto the overlook.
“Dude, just saw this hella big moose. So close. Way cool.”
Wilco peers over his shades. “Careful, moppet, those things’ll stomp you to death.”
Sean sits between Samantha and Wilco, reaches across the girl’s lap for the pipe and takes another puff. He hands the pipe to Wilco. “You know that’s the name of a band, don’t you? Wilco. Never heard anybody else use it.”
“My family’s from Minnesota,” Wilco says. “Totally white bread. Men had names like Algernon and Horatio back in the day. Dad’s name is Theodore. I guess they’d gotten around to the W’s by the time I was born.”
I roll onto one elbow to look at the sketch. An old man stares up from the pad: bald, jowly, wrinkled about the eyes. I don’t like it, but a picture can’t lie. This one captures none of the sexy joie de vivre I use to mask the truth. Old is old, it says.
“You know,” Sean says, drawing a line with his finger down the length of the inlet. “All this beauty, plus practically getting stomped on, makes me think.”
“Uh oh,” the young woman says. “He’s been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
“Hilarious, Samantha. Dude seems cool.” Sean turns to me. “If you don’t mind. I mean, I don’t know a lot of old people. Just my Gramps and I couldn’t ask him this. So, uh, are you, like, stoked for death, or what?”
I rise onto both hands and give him my best incredulous look.
“Sean, don’t be clueless,” Samantha says. “That’s a little too personal, don’t you think.”
We’re quiet for some time, magpies flitting in the cottonwoods, testing their raucous calls. Believe me, there’s been enough death in my life to make it more than just a concept. “It still feels like,” I say, trying to offer something reassuring, “what happens to other people.”
“Dude, seriously. A bear could come through here right now and turn us all into lunch meat,” Sean says.
“Not likely.” Wilco crosses his legs and pulls down his cap. The sun is getting lower. More time has passed than I thought.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe death’s a good thing. There’s only so much a person can take.”
“What is this?” Wilco says. “Truth or Dare? I’m officially tabling this discussion.”
“I’m seventeen years older than him. He doesn’t like to think about me dying.”
“Come on, David,” Wilco says. “Where’s my funny guy?”
“You know, my father was strict with me too,” I tell the young man. When I’m stoned, I become trapped by my thoughts. I can’t turn the ship around so easily, not even for Wilco. “I didn’t have a TV until after I went to college. He was a religious man, vice-chancellor at Texas Tech. With him, it was all about personal betterment and service.
“Wilco’s dad’s a champ, though. We go back there each Christmas, and his father takes me ice fishing. Nobody else will go with him, and I don’t mind. We drink whisky from a flask and look out the porthole window at nothing. Only catch a few puny fish. I never did anything remotely intimate like that with my father. Wilco doesn’t know how lucky he is. He’s got the complacency of the well-adjusted.”
“I’m right here, you know,” Wilco says.
“He’s never had to give anything up.”
Wilco hauls himself onto the balls of his feet, fingertips tented on the rock like a sprinter at the starting line. I know I’m in for it. “I told you, you could say no. We could stay in Houston.”
I turn to Sean. “He’d have blamed me for ruining our finances and our future happiness.”
“Dude, I got no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You hated that job,” Wilco says.
“I had something to do every day.”
Sean fidgets with the pipe. “Maybe you guys should take another hit.”
Wilco stands. It’s time to go. I want to linger, this patch of rock apart from the world and we, like gods immune to complications of our own, hovering over it.
Below, between the mountain and the road, a shadow bisects the remnant of a pond, a bog of electric green grass. Increasing in height outward from its center, a troop of stick figures marches ten or so yards, the dense encircling forest halting its progress.
Black Spruce. I read about them in the back of that hiking book. The spruce, they seem so fragile—scraggly, gray, seemingly half dead—but they carve a place for themselves where little else can, with sedges at the damp edge of a bog.
It’s probably the marijuana or a case of too much sunlight, but something about how sad and brave they look makes me feel giddy. “Come to the house, Samantha,” I say. “For dinner. Are you vegan?” She seems as though she might be vegan.
“We’re thinking of walking to Rabbit Lake,” Sean says.
“Long way back in there,” Wilco says.
“Land of the midnight sun,” Samantha says. “We can walk all night.”
“Tomorrow, then,” I say. “This has been so much fun. I feel already like we’re friends. We’re all about making new friends. Right, Wilco? Real friends, I mean, not soap opera ones. And you should see our place. It looks right over the water to the mountains. Wildlife outside our window practically every day. It’s almost as good as camping out, plus you have all your stuff. You should see what Wilco has done with it. Everything right out of the box. The furniture has that new leather smell. You know, the smell of beginnings, of no impediments.”
I can tell our moment is over and that I’m sort of freaking Samantha out, but I’m a stoner on a roll. “Come to the house,” I say, “before you leave Alaska. Just for a beer, even, out on the deck. I can’t tell you how good that place makes me feel. It’s perfect.”