Off Course

In the week before she saw him again, they all moved to Noah Mountain. Quinn, Sylvia, and Evan. The Sparkville house was up for rent.

“Had to do it,” Quinn said. “Had to give it a real shot. I owe her that.”

“I have to try. As many times as it takes to give it a real go. See if we can get along. Or I can’t live with myself.”

It was eleven-something, not even noon. He left a cup of coffee untouched on her kitchen table, and his fly-tying vise was still clamped to the corner.

She emptied his cup in the sink. As his truck trundled down her driveway, she poured herself half a tumbler of bourbon—from the bottle he’d bought in Glendale—and took it outside to the porch facing the river, where she sat in a chair and waited for the pain to start.

In the mornings, she had a moment of pure bright emptiness before the truth broke over her again: Quinn and his wife now lived up the road in a double-wide aluminum home.

On the days she didn’t work, she stayed in bed, drifting and periodically nosing her sheets for any scent of him. Food didn’t interest her. She tried to take her morning walks but never made it down the driveway before she had to turn around and go back to bed.

It was a dry, hot summer. The hills crisped to the color of lions. The high whine of insects bore steadily through the air. The river, low this year, receded; the swimming hole was stagnant at its edges by mid-July. A dark flickering appeared in the corners of her eyes, and at first she didn’t know what it was, but every day it seemed closer, stronger, closing in. If you found the one person you loved, and you couldn’t lick his neck or stick your nose up under his hair, or fall asleep tangled in his limbs, what did you do? Her tears ran without warning, sudden sobs made her chest jump. A new line trembled on the horizon, a fine dark fissure opened between objects: the abyss, beckoning. She tried to pray: Look, whoever’s listening. Let them finish. Send him back. We won’t survive apart.

She wasn’t making specific plans, but that hairline crack, she knew, could widen instantly to accommodate her, and day by day, its thin blackness grew less frightening, more logical and familiar, as if she could now walk right up, touch it with her fingertips, and, with a quick last smile over her shoulder at the fading world, slip right in. She was sorry. If she ever did, he’d mistake it for the meanest thing imaginable. But the natural outcome of abandonment was a failure to thrive, to survive.

She didn’t see how she could continue much longer. Eating seemed senseless. At Younts, she passed up the two-pound Yuban special; she couldn’t imagine living long enough to drink it all.

The first time she passed Sylvia in her blue Imperial on Noah Mountain Road, Cress felt as if she’d been squeezed like a sponge.

She took a box of winter clothes to the barn and was drawn into the old mechanic’s bay, which was cool and smelled of dirt and oil. She crouched on the floor between oil spots, then sat for an hour. The next day, she swept it out, found carpet scraps that fit, and made a tiny, subterranean room. A thick round of cut pine served as a table. On this, she put a candle and the little donkey. She brought a pillow and her old down sleeping bag, and she would lie there, fingertips on each cool concrete wall. By remaining absolutely still, she could make an hour pass, then two hours, three. Any movement and the pain unfurled.

On Noah Mountain Road, a row of telephone poles planted in the left shoulder of a curve introduced themselves. All she’d have to do was not turn the steering wheel.

“If he was really going to leave her, he would’ve done it the first time round,” said Donna. Cress had stopped by to see the sycamore tree, the Hapsaw, the lilac bush once more.

“Of adulterers who leave their spouses,” Donna went on, “something like 95 percent do it in the first three months of the affair.”

Somehow Cress went to work. She wouldn’t desert Dalia and Lisette again, as she had last year. She clocked in and washed lettuce for the cook, hauled the tables around, flung starched white cloths over them, arranged silverware, built tall pyramids out of wide-mouth champagne glasses; she trayed out hors d’oeuvres, took cocktail orders. She spoke rarely and in a whisper. In this way, moment to moment, by turning to the next small task, by functioning as part of a larger mechanism, she kept on.

Dalia called her into the office. “Oh, Cress. We’ve all had our hearts broken, but you can’t let it go on too long, and take it in too deep. You’ve got to save yourself—go see someone, try to meditate, something. Or you might never make it back.”

Back to where? Back to what? Her old life—school, econ—no longer existed. She could finish her dissertation, but where would that take her? There was no place she wanted to go, or could imagine ever wanting to go. She had to be where he could find her.

Somehow—perhaps because she was too polite and too intimidated by Silas not to return his calls or complete the next column she’d promised him (this one about art resale profits and commissions)—she did the research and wrote it. Her reporting was minimal; talking to people was the hardest part; she couldn’t drum interest into her voice. She made do with a few meager facts and data she’d coaxed from a secretary at Sotheby’s and one voluble gallery owner. Of the eighty thousand dollars in increased value, the artist received 2 percent.

She lost twelve pounds. She weighed what she had at fourteen. For her third column, Cress went south to interview an art consultant over lunch. She drove down the night before, to stay at Braithway. Tillie had promised to dress her.

Tillie said, “You may not see it right now, but it’s really for the best. Also, Cress, you look like a model.”

The consultant purchased art for corporations and hospitals, and also for actors and movie execs who didn’t have the time—or the eye—to shop. “After they buy the BMW and take the trekking vacation,” the woman said, “these guys buy art.” The consultant had selected the restaurant for their meeting, and their two pretty, clean-tasting, hand-built salads cost fifty dollars.

Cress went from lunch to the magazine offices, where she finally met Silas, a tall, soft-looking man her age. Taking the lunch receipt, he said, “Ooh la la! Now there’s a woman who is good at spending other people’s money!” Column three’s lede: Maude Sweeney has a talent for spending other people’s money.

Days passed. Work at Beech Creek slowed down. In the hot late afternoons after golf lady luncheons or the Rotarians, Cress took a glass of wine to the barn, into the cool trough. She lit a candle, drank the wine, and lay down on her sleeping bag. She counted her breaths backward from a hundred, a form of meditation she’d read about. She rarely remembered getting below the eighties. She woke up to a guttering flame, or utter darkness. That was when she knew it most keenly. He was coming back. He was on his way.

Cress drove south in early September for her fourth column, which was about an international art exposition at the convention center. Galleries from all over the world displayed paintings and sculptures in souklike warrens. The middle class had disposable income again, and goods were pouring in. Even Cress, whose arms felt like lead, who had no taste for life, was making money—not a lot, but more than she ever had: her own small share of the boom pot.

Driving to Los Angeles and back, always alone, her mind stayed busy with its own absorbing mix of memory and hope. She replayed their encounters, combing them for clues and meaning, as if their love was a great mystery or puzzle to be solved. Had he really gone back for good? She didn’t believe it. He could no more give her up than she could forget him. He was struggling, too.

She returned again and again to her little house in the tilted pasture: to her hard bed, her cool, tiny, secret room in the barn.

Trey Kidman, who hadn’t seen her walking in weeks, came by bringing brownies with some sparkle. Was she okay? She looked so pale and sad—did she want him to rub her back?

Dalia and Lisette took her out for drinks after work, in hopes of cheering her up. They went to the Lakeview bar, the Sawyer Inn, and talked brightly, trying to interest Cress with confidences. Dalia told the story of her brutal five-year marriage. Lisette told them how she used to be the girlfriend of a famous rock star, but she’d hated that life and had to leave it. She was glad, because then she met her husband—after nine years they still made love every single day.

Touched by their company, Cress nodded and sipped her beer and asked questions to simulate interest and keep them talking.

“You don’t know they’re going to be physically abusive until they are,” Dalia said.

And, “No! But then, we vary it a lot, sometimes we draw it out with massage or toys, whatever, and sometimes it’s a quickie.”

At a hundred days, Cress lobbed his fly-tying vise into the swimming hole, but the smallish plunk and splash gave her no lift. Twenty-five days later, the silver flask flashed up in the water, like a trout’s pale belly, then glugged water and sank. She couldn’t bring herself to smash the donkey, whose black eyes shone. She could keep one memento. Something that, in thirty years, she could still admire. The finely delineated mane. The precise hoofs and tiny black teats.

Trey Kidman came again; this time she was in the barn, counting backward in the concrete bay. He called her name at the gate, then knocked on her door; she was afraid he’d try the barn next, but after a while he left.

In mid-October, rain came in daylong bursts, leaving the land sodden, the dry grasses beaten flat and mildewing. She retrieved her boxes of warm clothes from the barn. When she lifted the garments out, the wool and cashmere were full of holes, speckled with larval crumbs.

He couldn’t bear this any more than she could. She was sure of it. But he was doing what needed to be done. Making a real attempt. The dark flickers persisted in her peripheral vision. She drove up the narrow logging road toward Wanderwood, until she was face-to-face with Noah Mountain’s slag piles. She parked and got out; she could see right down into the family compound: the mother’s white clapboard house, the trailers big and small. Sylvia’s car parked at an angle. Stacks of wood, of rusty junk, an old water heater. A haphazard rural cluster: Would it ever be her home?

She tried to drive on to Wanderwood, to be, at least, in his favorite place. But the road was more treacherous than she’d remembered, and after scraping the bottom of the Saab on a rock, she lost heart and had to back up for most of a mile before she found a place to turn around.

She passed Quinn on the road. His fingers lifted off the steering wheel in a quick gallop that rippled through her, reset her heart to a mad bang.

“He’s suffering, too.” She was at Braithway again, having come down for a meeting at the magazine. She and Tillie drank wine in her kitchen. “I feel it.”

“You know what? I can’t talk to you about Quinn anymore. He’s gone back to his wife. It’s over. You’re obsessed. You should talk to a professional.”

Cress was surprised, and somewhat flattered that her unhappiness might qualify her in Tillie’s eyes for a therapist.

“And you need to start eating,” Tillie added. “It’s getting scary. Now you look like a junkie.”

Cress’s mother had never visited her in college or grad school. In Sylvia Hartley’s worldview, children visited parents. Yet here she was, self-invited, at Cress’s door, having driven up from Carpenteria that morning. She held a sack of groceries: a leg of lamb, bananas, V8 juice, food she remembered Cress liking as a child. There were more presents in the car: a polka-dot comforter, two Indian-print blouses, an electric popcorn popper, all Price Club bargains.

Sylvia Hartley stalked through the little house, which was too clean to fault. “Do you like living here?”

“It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived.” Cress motioned toward the slanted fields, the ring of blue mountains.

Sylvia sighed loudly and sat on the couch. She extended her legs, examined the ring on her right hand, a sapphire sunk in yellow gold. “It’s time to move on,” she said. “Time to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

“What if I don’t have any bootstraps?” Cress said. “What are bootstraps, anyway?”

“After all that time and work and money?” Sylvia surveyed the small living room with its pale carpet and random furniture. She frowned at the wicker love seat as if she could not quite place it. “What’s going on, Cress, that your friends are calling me to say you’re in terrible shape and they’re afraid you might do something bad to yourself?”

“For crying out loud, Cress. It’s not realistic, after all this time, to go on and on about him. He’s a married man!”

“I don’t know what happened with you girls. Sharon only likes foreign men and you only like married ones.”

“Not ones, Mom. One. One man. But maybe if you’d let us have a more normal social life in high school—”

“I’m just saying, maybe if I’d had more experience with guys when I was young—”

Sylvia watched her. “What do you need? I’ll help you with whatever it is. An apartment in San Francisco? Seattle? I think you should go away. Get out of this place. Take a long trip. If you’d done that back when I first suggested it, you’d be beyond all this by now. Europe? Japan? I’ll buy your ticket.”

Sylvia lowered her voice. “Of course, you can’t tell your father. But I have a little nest egg. I can spend it however I want. If you need me to, I’ll go with you. Wherever you want. Whatever it takes to pull you out of this.”

“No.” Cress shook her head, slinging tears. She no longer thought so grandly. Her hopes were more circumspect; she hoped to see and speak to him, to smell up under his hair again. To stop the pain for a minute here, a minute there.

“You wouldn’t want him, anyway,” her mother said. “Not for a husband. Not in the long run.”

Her mother went to the kitchen and came back with two glasses of wine. “I’d like to take you to a hospital, Cress. I think you need to check yourself in.”

“You’re not in good shape, Cress. You’re way too skinny. You’re talking at half speed. I can barely hear you.”

“I do. I do need to do something. I can’t let you slip through my fingers.”

Sylvia looked at her for a long time, then stood and put the lamb in the oven, boiled the string beans, set the table.

Cress was moved by her mother’s visit and sorry to be so frustrating. She choked down some lamb, ate a whole banana. She had to make many promises before her mother would leave: she promised to eat, to consider moving, to socialize, to raise her voice, to cut back on the wine. She promised to exercise, to try to forget Quinn, to revisit her dissertation. She accepted another check, for four hundred dollars, and never cashed it.

When she got into her Camry, Sylvia Hartley latched her seat belt, then rolled down her window, motioning Cress close. “I just want to say, you were right,” she said, “the Meadows has been a mistake, from day one. What with Rick Garsh and what’s happened to you, I wish I’d never heard of the place.”

Watching the Camry drive off, Cress made a promise to herself: to put on a better front from here on out, and keep her problems to herself.

Well. It has been a year and a half since I was born anew into this vale of tears, and things are looking up! Life in London continues apace. I have more students than is ideal and am also teaching pedagogy to the London Cello Instructors Association. I’m down to a size 10 again (I’m back in OA—it’s been like slogging through mud!!!). I’m getting restless and have been sniffing about for foreign teaching gigs—in China, Turkey (of course!—or haven’t I told you about Ibrahim?), and even grotty old L.A.

I hear things are not so hot for you—and I’ve been given to understand that this is MY fault (source: Guess Who?). If I’d let you come to England to be properly distracted, I’m told, you’d be well over the hauntingly handsome husband-of-another by now, plus: Ph.D.’ed, AND gainfully employed at some well-compensated economic research post.

Seriously, though, I hear that you have been very sad, and I would like to make amends to you for the part I did play in adding to that sadness: i.e., for not being available to you when I might’ve helped you out. I was careening about in my own oblivious way (i.e., head up arse), without thinking much or at all about the impact I might be having on you or anyone else. I’m truly sorry for that, and I can say with confidence that I won’t ever be so impervious to you again.

I HATE a rift, esp. between US!!! You are the one member of our family I can talk to … stand … adore. The one person on earth who knows what it was like being in a family with Those Two. I miss your letters and your news. If the alarms sounding across the pond are even the tiniest bit true, I’m also very worried about you, and would like to help in any way I can. I will happily buy you a ticket to my TLC, i.e., Thoroughly Lumpy Couch, or I can come and occupy yours—if my company might cheer and you will have me. Just say the word.

P.S. If you come, don’t worry about what it costs me. The Great Mother has offered to fund everything if I can just pry you out of your mountain cave. Don’t you think we should take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime offer???

*Down from 187!!!

A pale log building went up on the west side of Sawyer: a new bar, BOB’S BAR, the sign said. After a Rotary luncheon, Dalia, Cress, and Lisette decided to drive over for a look. They took separate cars to the unpaved parking lot. The owner himself, eponymous Bob, a square-headed, Hawaiian-shirted Visalia man, bought their first round. Beautiful women, he said, passing out the draft beers, were a boon for business.

Only in the hustings with two better-looking women, Cress thought, would she ever be called beautiful. She sat facing the two new pool tables, the felt expanses unmarred, the triangles of candy-colored balls poised to explode. The new log walls looked wet, resinous, as if brushed with maple syrup.

Dalia said, “Don’t look now, Cress, but your guy just came in.”

She froze and didn’t turn. She hadn’t seen him for a hundred and seventy-four days. Her heart started slamming around her rib cage. She heated up. “Does he see me?”

“I would say he most definitely sees you.”

“Let him look,” she said.

He would have spotted her Saab in the lot. Had he been looking for it, hoping to see it for a while now? Or had he turned in on a momentary impulse? Still, he had to park, get out, lock his truck, and walk inside: time enough to reconsider. She finished her beer. “Here I go,” she said.

Dalia said, “Oh, don’t. You really shouldn’t.”

“Oh no, Cress, no,” said Lisette.

“I have to,” Cress said. “I can’t not.”

Spine straight, blushing and trembling like a bride, she walked across the concrete floor, past the line of men drinking at the bar.

“What took you so long?” he said.

His voice crackled through her veins as through ice. “How’ve you been?” she whispered.

“Good, good,” he said. “You?”

“Not so good.”

“You still know how to cook a pork chop?”

Inexorably came the blear of amazement that he would catapult over his scruples and his wife’s trust and once more turn to her.

“Leave first,” she said. “Give me a twenty-minute lead.”

She didn’t want her friends to know how instantly she’d capitulated. As she walked back to them, their faces were upturned, like plates, saucers of light and hope. Cress pulled out her chair.

“Look at you blushing,” said Lisette. “What did he say?”

She felt like a drunk trying to appear sober. “He’s doing well.”

“He’s leaving,” said Dalia.

“Good,” Cress said. “Anybody else want another beer?”

She bought the round and drank hers quickly. The noisy new room with its forlorn music and now-colliding pool balls was glazed in a rosy-amber light. Long before she’d planned to, Cress stood.

“Oh don’t,” Dalia said. “Don’t. Let’s go out to dinner. My treat.”

“It’s not what you think,” said Cress. “I’m going home.”

“We know what you’re doing,” said Dalia.

“Plain as day,” said Lisette. “You’re straining at the gate. About to burst.”

Cressida toed the ground, sipped air. “I can’t not,” she said. “I have to.”

“You should stop yourself,” said Dalia.

“Don’t do it,” said Lisette. “Just say no.”

* * *

How easily the car steered. How light were her arms. The phone poles ticked past. Not today, guys. The pain had receded, coiled back to its depths. How soft were the darkening hills, how sweet the breeze.

He met her in the hall, by the washer.

She showed him the magazines, her name in print. He read three columns, right there in front of her. “If you can do this,” he said, “why are you still here?”

“You have to ask?”

In bed, they both wept; his wet cheeks glistened in the dark room. His beard was back, his hair long again. He’d gained weight, having stopped all cigarettes and all booze but beer. She went over his body, touching each scar, poked his new belly, stuck her nose up behind his ear, inhaled.

“How is it at home?” she said.

“Better, now that we’re back on the mountain.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Exactly what you’re doing.”

“Not exactly,” she said. He was there for the alleviation of pain. And she was still hoping to redeem what had been offered to her once, what seemed to sit there yet, waiting to be claimed, just out of reach.