FOUR
THE JACK of Diamonds was a low building of dark dovetailed timbers and square yellow windows set against the bank of the forest. Pierre went around to the side, through the kitchen, and down to the basement, where he had a locker with dry socks and sneakers. He put them on and went upstairs.
Chris Garner and Larry Rudd were sitting at the bar. They came in three or four times a week to drink beer and talk of obscure subjects and everyday items, such as rotary weed trimmers or garbage disposals, that were more dangerous than commonly understood. They were in their fifties and had been teammates on a basketball team that almost went to the state tournament many years ago. Now Rudd owned two vacuum cleaner stores and Garner sold shoes.
Pierre rearranged the liquor bottles as they talked. He grouped them by color, which other bartenders found unprofessional, because blue gins would end up next to blue vodkas, for example, but so be it.
“Oh, we watched it,” said Rudd. “The wife and me, in the comfort of our home. Watched the whole movie. But if that’s supposed to be sexy, I don’t know, I must be missing something.”
“Because of the masks,” said Garner.
“Yeah. You couldn’t tell who anybody was.”
“But that’s the idea, though, isn’t it. The anonymity.
That it would tend to make it more exciting.”
“Not knowing what somebody looks like?” said Rudd. “What exciting about that?”
“Well, it depends on the mask, I guess. If it was like the Lone Ranger wore you would have a pretty good idea of the overall appearance.”
“Nah, these were over their whole faces. They were supposed to be—I don’t know what. Cats. Spirits of the past. Birds. I believe there were birds. Lords and ladies.”
“Frightening things,” suggested Garner. “At, like, a ball or something.”
“Well, again, that may have been the intention. But to me it was very implausible.”
“Maybe it’s different for young people,” said Garner. “Pierre, get in on this.”
“What’s the question?” said Pierre.
“Would you sleep with some woman if you didn’t know who it was because she was wearing a mask?”
“That’s what you’re asking.”
“Rudd seen a movie about that.”
“I don’t know.”
“But you might.”
“It’s possible.”
“Pierre, you dog.”
“You guys about ready?”
Pierre drew two beers, poured off the foam, topped the glasses up, and set them on the bar.
“A face is kind of a mask anyway, when you think about it,” he said.
Rudd took a drink and set the glass down. “You should never ask Pierre anything.”
“You don’t make your face,” said Pierre. “It’s given to you. You might think it represents your true self, but why would it? Half the time you make an expression and think, Oh, this is my whatever expression, and nobody even knows what you’re thinking.”
“That’s true,” said Garner. “I have no idea what my face looks like to the outside world.”
“That’s just as well,” said Rudd. “So anyway, we get done watching this sex movie with all the masks, and I go out to the kitchen, and there’s some water standing in the sink. So what do I do? I run the garbage disposal, right, as that’s the only way to get rid of the water. And this is my problem with them: that you can’t just pull some simple plug but you have to fire up the equivalent of an outboard motor to get the fucking water out of the sink—when what should come shooting out but this huge shard of blue glass. I was lucky it didn’t kill me.”
Pierre gave last call at the end of the night, and everyone but Chris Garner went home. The shoe salesman lived alone and was often the last to leave. He sat at a table near the bar with a Rusty Nail he’d been working on for some time. Pierre carted kegs up to the walk in cooler and then went behind the bar, where he stood counting money and putting it in the cash box.
“Do you believe in fate, Chris?” he said.
“Fate.”
“Yeah. That things happen for a reason.”
“Sometimes. Like if your car won’t start, and you left the lights on, that’s probably why.”
“That’s not fate.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“Fate is more like you leaving your lights on in order that the car won’t start.”
“Who would do that?”
“Nobody, on purpose. But if you were meant to.”
“Then no. I would have to say I don’t believe it. You must, however, or you wouldn’t raise the question.”
“I’m not sure.”
“You should ask Rudd. He would know.”
“Yeah?”
“Or if he didn’t, he would make something up.”
Terry Benton, owner of the Jack of Diamonds, came in at half past midnight. His story was one of those you read about from time to time. He had made a lot of money designing computer networks in Oregon and retired nine years ago at the age of forty four to return to the Midwest and start a supper club. His idea had been to re-create an earlier Jack of Diamonds, which had been in Eden Center and which he remembered from his childhood.
“Any trouble tonight?” he said.
“Nope,” said Pierre.
“How’d we do?”
“Better than last Sunday.”
“Last Sunday wasn’t bad.”
“Yeah, so . . . better than that.”
Terry laid his camel hair coat along the bar, sat down, and turned toward the room. He had a deceptive build—wide of frame but not very deep, as if he had been flattened by a cartoon steamroller. “Do you like the chairs?”
“I guess so,” said Pierre. “What about them?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure about the red vinyl anymore.”
“What would you get, wood?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Can’t hardly go wrong with wood,” said Pierre.
“The red might be too busy.”
“I fell in the lake today.”
“Did you?”
“I was skating.”
“You wouldn’t catch me on that lake.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because you fall in. What’s wrong with Garner?”
Pierre shrugged and raised his eyebrows.
Terry walked out among the tables, swinging his arms and clapping his hands. “Let’s be going home, Chris.”
“All right, all right,” said Garner. He stood and put on his overcoat. He adjusted the lapels and shook his head and walked with Terry to the door.
“You could use some new shoes,” he said. “Why don’t you stop in one of these times?”
“Maybe I will. But tell me something. What’s your opinion of the chairs?”
“They seem fine to me, Terry.”
Terry had a lot invested in the place. He’d outfitted the kitchen with Ramhold-Bailer appliances, hired the chef Keith Lyon away from the Chanticleer in Austin, Minnesota, and commissioned an artist to paint murals on the walls. In the style of Grant Wood, the murals portrayed the surrounding countryside as a nearsighted dream in which everything was smoother and greener and more discrete than in life. The bar itself was cherrywood and stable as stone.
Terry had wanted the restaurant to be suave, for that is how he remembered the original, but he also wanted it to be popular, and he seemed flexible as to how this might be achieved.
You could see this in his reaction to the incident of the sink and the sign. Late one night about a year before, a man who had been shut off from drinking anymore went into the men’s room and tore the sink off the wall. He was banned for life but that was not the end of it. A couple of days later a homemade sign appeared in the ditch along the Lake Road leading to the Jack of Diamonds. It was black paint on white plywood, and what it said was:
TWO MILES TO THE
STINKING GREASE PIT
Well, there was no question who had put up the sign. It was obviously the man who had wrecked the sink and flooded the men’s room. And at their weekly meeting most of the employees agreed that the thing to do was to pull up the sign and throw it away.
But Terry said, “Let’s think about this.”
He said, “We are not afraid of this accusation. It is laughable. The Jack happens to have Keith Lyon, probably the best chef in the Driftless Area.”
Terry was always trying to get people to call the Jack of Diamonds “the Jack,” as he thought it sounded hipper and more inviting.
“And don’t say anything, Keith, because you know I’m right. That lamb thing you make, whatever it is, on the open fire, and they wrote it up in the magazine—”
Keith sat at the bar drinking white wine. He could be brutal when things went wrong in the kitchen but was kind of quiet and bemused otherwise. “Lamb à la Primitive,” he said.
“Right. So I ask you. Grease pit? Are you kidding me? And might it not be the cooler thing if we did not respond? If we did not deign to respond.”
“I think it’s an insult,” said the waitress, Charlotte Blonde.
Despite her name Charlotte was a brunette. She had begun waiting tables to pay tuition at the community college in Desmond City but she got pregnant by a teaching assistant and tuition went up, and now she had a infant daughter and a full-time job.
“And it could add to our cult status,” Terry Benton said. “What sort of place would ignore such a sign as if it didn’t exist? A cool place, I would think. A place that is very confident of its own value.”
“As to the sign, I don’t care one way or the other,” said Keith Lyon. “I’m not sure we have cult status, but the sign is not an issue to me, because that’s not how I get here anyway.”
“Well, okay,” said Terry. “If we don’t have cult status, this might give us one.”
And that is why the plywood sign painted with the bitterness of the banned customer still stands on the Lens Lake Road in Shale. It has been changed, though. Now it says:
TWO MILES TO THE
JACK OF DIAMONDS
The judge presiding over the charges against Pierre seemed young and lost in the robe of justice. It was black and slick like a poncho in the rain, and he kept pushing the sleeves up so they would not interfere with his hands.
He was one of those judges who make it a point to know as little as possible about the cases before them. He would state the facts all wrong and rely on the lawyers to set him straight and in general seemed to resent having to deal with so many instances of societal breakdown.
But he was a judge, Pierre thought, and must have aspired to become one, so what had he been expecting? Naturally, the people in court had problems. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in court.
The lawyers responded to the young judge’s habitual confusion with deference bordering on sarcasm, laying it on with phrases like “should it please the Court” and “if Your Honor might be directed to the document at his perusal,” until you would think that nothing productive ever got done here at all, or, if it did, it was because it had been worked out in advance, as in Pierre’s case.
“I have what I take to be a plea agreement,” said the judge. “But I will tell you right now that I am neither bound—nor, for that matter, inclined—to accept it.”
Pierre’s lawyer leaned toward him, bringing along a fog of cologne like the gift shop of a failing hospital. The reflection of the neon lights curved in his large glasses. “Don’t worry. He’s got to say that. It’s just for the people in the cheap seats.”
“Being inebriated, the defendant broke up a party,” said the judge. “He does not dispute this. He does not express remorse. This is a hostile act disguised as carelessness, and this court doesn’t go for that kind of thing. Moreover, if Accelerated Rehabilitation is for exceptional cases—and we agree that it is, so I guess it must be—then—”
“Your Honor, if I might interject,” said Pierre’s lawyer. “My client did not break up a party. The party, to the best of my knowledge—uh, continued for several hours. And he has plenty of remorse. If he has not expressed it to this point, it is due to the simple fact that no one has asked him or offered a forum in which he might do so.”
The judge seized the papers on his desk, looking at one, tossing it aside, looking at another, squinting and scowling. “Where’s the bill of particulars?”
“Now, he went into a party.”
Still shuffling papers, the judge said, as if to himself, “He went into a party. Well, I hate to tell you, but that is not illegal.”
“He walked into a house where a party was under way,” said the prosecutor. “By virtue of leaving their door unlocked, as one well might while hosting a party, the law-abiding owners of the house became subject to an unwanted incursion which the defendant refused to forego except in his own sweet time.”
“Is this true, Pierre?”
“More or less,” said Pierre, “but I did leave.”
“Was there no violence? What am I thinking of? Was there another case like this one?”
“Let me read to you,” the prosecutor continued. “I quote here the police report. ‘Asked for why he would not go, subject states he needs a little time and demands they let him do his coin trick or he will not leave.’ ”
“‘For why he would not go. . . .’” said the judge.
“Your Honor, if I might footnote that,” said Pierre’s attorney.
“No, I don’t think you might,” said the judge. “A coin trick? Is that really why we’re here? Am I given to understand we are talking about a coin trick?”
“It’s in the affidavit,” said the prosecutor. “But I would argue that what he actually did in the house is not pertinent. Only a card trick, perhaps that’s so. But does this mean that anyone who breaks into a house will be armored against prosecution provided he insists on performing some—”
“Well now, wait, is it a card trick or a coin trick?” said the judge.
“I’m sorry, you’re right; it is a coin trick.”
“And would the defendant like to demonstrate this trick for the court?”
“No, Your Honor,” said Pierre.
“And, you know, that’s probably wise.”
The judge found the paper he was looking for, flattened it with the edge of his hand, and signed it.
“I will take the plea,” he said. “You know I don’t want to, yet by my signature I so order.”
Accelerated Rehabilitation had a scientific sound, as if Pierre would rehabilitate faster and faster in an elliptical path until evaporating in a blue flash of pure mental health.
Instead, he entered a counseling class that met once a week in a red Queen Anne house in Desmond City for ten weeks that spring and summer. The counselor had a black and gray ponytail and a gold earring, and he wore pale blue or yellow shirts with voluminous short sleeves, and in general his look seemed calculated to disarm them with its mix of influences.
Pierre found the class slow and insincere. The room where they met had faded green wallpaper with an oppressive pattern of vines, and the box of tissues for the presumed crying could only be considered grotesque. Yet he had no one at all to blame for his being there except himself, and he could not say he didn’t learn anything.
One night the class went to an auditorium at the hospital to hear a panel discussion among relatives of people killed in drunk-driving accidents. They spoke of the accidents and how they were told—a phone call, a knock on the door—and of the things left behind that they could not bear to see, and he heard sometimes in their voices a desolation beyond questioning. He thought of the long emptiness of nights that had brought them here to speak reasonably to people who were in essence standing in for the killers. And he did not know how they could do it.
Another time everyone in the class had to select a shrine to a highway fatality and write an essay about it. There are a number of these makeshift markers on the narrow roads of the Driftless Area. It is hard to give them their due while driving through the normal day. You notice them for a while; then they fade into the scenery as the weather washes their brightness away.
Thus one morning in May, Pierre parked his car up north of Midlothian where a young woman who had attended his high school had died in a crash.
A car driven by a man from Lansville had crossed the center line and sideswiped her car, sending it into a tree. This was three years ago, when she was nineteen years old, and now she would always be that age.
There was a cross decorated with beads, and beneath it people had left perfume bottles and flowers and smooth polished stones. Pierre sat down in the grass with a pad of yellow paper and a pencil. He looked down the road. A string of blackbirds dipped and peeled off in sequence to the east with the red blaze on their wings. It was so quiet he could almost hear the girl’s soft and rounded voice from school. But her words were not clear and he had to make them up:
Now you bring flowers and rocks from a rock polisher, when they can help only you. Where were the presents when I was alive? I did get a yellow rose at a dance once but it broke off and I stepped on it while trying to pick it up. Some said I must have been high to trample my rose that way, but I knew there must be some cure from this terrible uneasiness of the young. That time in U.S. History class, for example, when I made the mistake of saying “Tens of thousands of families gathered up their meager belongings and set out for the Oregon Territory in a single covered wagon.” I realize now how it sounded. And you laughed, first some of you and then many, although you knew what I meant, because we had all read the chapter. The laughing hurt, you wouldn’t believe how much. So while you drive by now and you might say, How nice, how sad, and think that something has been resolved, I can tell you that it has not. Bring me back, if you want to help. I would be the one who came back. It would be good if one person could. I would speak out at public forums against alcohol and cars. Whatever you want me to say. Out here it’s just the birds and the sun and the grasshoppers that zap around in the air. It’s strange that this would end up being my place when I was only here for such a short time.
“Now, Pierre, I know you have resisted these sessions,” said the counselor. “That’s been obvious. And you’re a bartender. You have a vested interest. But this essay. This essay is just weird.”
“Is it?”
“For a number of reasons, yeah. But let me hone in on just one. You say she would speak out against cars.”
“Right.”
It was the last day of class, and the counselor was meeting with the students one by one to tell them whether they had passed or would be required to take another session. He and Pierre were in the office and the counselor sat behind the desk, worrying his earring and tapping a thick black pen slowly against a clipboard.
“Why cars?”
“Well, I just think that if you took away cars, a lot of the problems that people have with alcohol they wouldn’t have. I mean, they might have other problems, but they would be less likely to kill somebody.”
“How would they get from place to place?”
“I mean the cars we have now. They’re already working on ones that won’t crash no matter who’s driving—even if nobody’s driving.”
“Alcohol is the problem with alcohol, Pierre.”
“No, I get that. But you have to admit, the transportation system is insane.”
“What about you? You weren’t driving. Instead, you broke into somebody’s house.”
“No, I didn’t. The door was unlocked. I was just mistaken.”
“And still are, Pierre. And still are mistaken,” said the counselor. “You might think you’re unique, but let me tell you something. You are not. And I don’t say this harshly. But you’re just like a thousand people who come through this program. You think something outside yourself is going to fix you up. Be it a drink. Be it a drug. Be it a relationship. And then you’ll be all right. But you will never be all right. Never. Until you know why you need fixing up in the first place. Does any of this make sense to you?”
“Not really.”
The counselor shook his head and picked up the clipboard. “That’s about what I figured.”
“You’re not going to pass me.”
“That’s correct. My recommendation is one more session. So all I need you to do is sign this document.”
He handed the clipboard to Pierre.
“I don’t want any more classes.”
“That’s why this is only a recommendation.”
“I don’t want to sign it.”
“Well, you don’t have to.”
“Oh. Good.”
“I’m asking you to.”
“No.”
That night the political screamers were on television, screaming about Social Security with their small faces in motion beneath Monster’s ashes. Nothing of what they said made any sense at all, yet they said it with such volume and such determination to drown each other out that it became entertaining.
Pierre drank from a green bottle of beer and set it on the floor beside his chair. He tried to think of anyone he knew who worried about Social Security or even gave it a moment’s thought.
No, there wasn’t anyone.
After a while Pierre fell asleep in his chair. He could sleep anywhere and it did not matter if there was light or sound. If you liked sleep and music, he thought, you could always be happy enough. . . .
He dreamed that he and Stella Rosmarin were walking through her house and, though the hallway was dry, all the rooms were flooded. There were Dutch doors, and the top halves stood open so you could see the water that filled the rooms and lapped against the walls.
“Strange, huh? Now look at this,” said Stella.
She flicked a wall switch and flames lit up the perimeter of the ceiling. They started in a corner and ran all the way around as if in some unconventional natural gas setup.
“That doesn’t seem right,” said Pierre.
Then someone knocked on the door in the dream and the sound got louder until Pierre woke up and found that someone was knocking on his door.
It was Roland Miles, who was married to Carrie Sloan.
“What time is it?” said Pierre.
“I don’t know,” said Roland. “Eleven thirty? Twelve? Twelve-thirty?”
“You want a beer?”
“Carrie hit something with her car.”
Pierre wiped the sleep from his eyes. “Is she all right?”
“Yeah. The car isn’t, though.”
“What’d she hit?”
“The car’s all messed up on the side. I don’t know. A gas pump. The station outside Arcadia.”
Pierre got two beers from the refrigerator and they stood in the kitchen and opened them.
“When was this?”
“Couple days ago.”
“She hit a gas pump.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Either that or something near it. She’s got to be the most careless person I’ve ever known in my life. And she wonders why did this happen, why did that happen. She didn’t look where she was going. That’s how it happened.”
“It doesn’t sound like anything.”
Roland took a drink and his eyes widened, as they do when you’re in the middle of a drink and have something to say.
“You wake me up, scare the hell out of me,” said Pierre.
“Why are you scared? Do you like her?”
“’Course I like her.”
“Yeah, I know you do.”
Roland Miles had been all conference as a halfback for the Shale-Midlothian Lancers but had wrecked his knee in his second year of college and had come back from Nebraska on crutches and proposed to Carrie Sloan.
She said yes and Roland quit college and stayed on in Shale. That was four years ago now. When his knee had healed, he got a job with the parks department, which was a reliable employer of former sports stars.
Pierre could not figure out what Roland’s area of responsibility was, and Roland did not seem especially concerned about this himself. He was always driving pickups around with rakes and barrels and sawhorses in the back and no evident requirement to get anywhere.
Roland and Carrie’s marriage was famously combative. You would always see them fighting in one parking lot or another. Once they argued with such sarcastic cruelty while playing on opposite sides of a volleyball game that the other players walked away in embarrassment.
They’d each had one affair that Pierre knew of but seemed somehow unlikely to divorce. They were simply two emphatic personalities who were fated to marry and find out what that was like and fight about it.
Pierre and Roland had not been friends that long as they had more or less hated each other in high school; once Roland had even broken Pierre’s nose by throwing an elbow at him in football practice.
No one thing cleared up the animosity. It was more that others of their age had moved away or disappeared into parenthood and so they ended up becoming friends through attrition. Plus they were both hunters, and Roland had a sense of honor about hunting that Pierre admired.
A good example would be when some kids from out of town began sneaking up on farmhouses around Shale and picking off tame ducks and geese, and Roland responded by shooting out the windows of their car with bow and arrows while they were in the White Hart bar in Rainville.
Pierre and Roland sat drinking beer with their feet up on Pierre’s table.
“I saw Eleanor Carr tonight,” said Roland.
This was a woman in town whose son had died several months ago on an island in the Pacific Ocean. It was said to have been a diving accident, but there were also rumors of foul play and nobody knew what the real story was.
“What was she doing?”
“She had these garden shears and she was walking around cutting weeds.”
“In her yard?”
“No. The sidewalk. Not even her sidewalk.”
“I thought she wouldn’t leave the house.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
“What did her son do?” said Pierre.
“Somebody said he might have been working for the government.”
“The U.S. government.”
“What I heard.”
“Maybe it was the Department of Agriculture.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Weights and Measures.”
Roland got up and dropped his beer bottle in the galvanized garbage can near the door. “I wouldn’t want to die on an island,” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Pierre. “If you have to die, an island wouldn’t be so bad.”
“I think I’d take a mountain over an island.”
Pierre drove out to the lake one Saturday at the end of June. He told himself this was all he meant to do. Just see the lake. And there it was. A wedding was taking place on a houseboat a hundred yards from shore.
The wedding party stood on the boat in their tuxedos and white dresses and the bride’s veil and gown moved around like streamers in the wind.
It seemed a little contrived but at least they would always have something to talk about.
He left the beach. The Lake Road took him to the turnoff for Stella’s house. Of course this was why he’d come. He drove up into the evergreens where the road was striped with light and shade.
In the clearing of the yard Stella lay in a red bikini and dark glasses on a beach towel in the grass. She sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees when she saw him.
“I knew you would come,” she said.
“How?”
“You left your skates.”
“Oh, that’s right,” said Pierre. “I’d forgotten all about them.”
Stella’s house stood far above the lake, but you could see the north shore through the trees if you knew what you were looking at. In the winter Pierre hadn’t noticed how run down the place was. There were gardens on either side of the house, and they had grown up and fallen into wild tangles of dead vines and new roses.
“Lay out with me awhile,” she said.
“I’m not really dressed for it.”
She lay back down, and because of the sunglasses he couldn’t tell if she was looking at him or not. “Take off as much as you want,” she said.
Pierre sat down and pulled off his boots and socks and lay beside her on the grass and closed his eyes.
“You’re a modest guy, Pierre,” she said.
“I never do this,” he said.
“You should. You’re pale.”
“I used to work on farms. And that’s how you got your tan. So I always felt like you should get it by working.”
“What strange ideas you have,” said Stella. “What did you do on farms?”
“Oh, pick up rocks. Bale hay. The usual farm things.”
“And what would you do with these rocks, once you had picked them up?”
The sunlight pressed on his eyelids and the smell of her suntan lotion was warm and summery in the air.
“Throw them in a loader. They come up in the fields and you have to get rid of them or you can’t cultivate or something.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” said Stella. “I’ve been wishing somebody would come by and see how I was doing. Or bring me something they’ve read and say, ‘Have a look at this. It’s pretty interesting.’”
“You should get out more,” said Pierre.
“Mmm. I know it.”
“I just read a book. I could bring it to you.”
“Is it interesting?”
“Yeah, but sort of confusing.”
“I don’t mind that.”
“The idea of the book is that time doesn’t exist. And everything that ever happened or ever will was here from the start. And even, I think, different versions of what will seem to happen. Or, not here, but somewhere. That’s the confusing part. As to where it is exactly. But all at once.”
“Do you believe it?”
“I might if I could understand it,” said Pierre. “But even while I was reading it, I would turn the page and think, Well, what is that?”
“If not the passage of time.”
“Right.”
“Yes, bring that, and I’ll give it a read.”
Pierre opened his eyes. The colors of the grass and sky seemed to vibrate. He propped himself up on one elbow and turned toward her.
“Stella.”
“Yes, Pierre.”
“Would you like to go somewhere with me sometime?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I need to be here. But you can come back whenever you want.”
Then she got up and went into the yellow house and came out carrying the ice skates.
“What did you do to them?”
“Treated the leather, scoured the blades.”
“Thank you,” said Pierre. “This is something else I owe you for.”
“You’d better learn to ride that horse.”
Stella lay out a while longer under the sun and then went into the house and put the white robe on and took a string of lights from a cupboard in the kitchen. She arranged them around the bonsai tree on the table and plugged them into the wall with an extension cord. They were small decorative lights in the shape of acorns, with cloth leaves and wire vines attached to the cord between the lights. Some of the lights were shaded light green and others bronze. There was nothing special about them, but she had found them in this house and they helped her to think.
She sat at the table looking at the lights. Sharp at first, they began to blur and pulse as she watched. Her hands lay flat on the table and her breathing slowed and made no sound. She raised her head and closed her eyes but the lights remained in her vision, dimming slowly to darkness. And after a while a series of images began to play in her mind. Some of them she’d seen before, some not. And they always began the same way.
A gloved fist breaks a window
An armchair begins to burn
Walls blister, shatter, and fall
The bed rises, an island in a lake of fire
Now Stella’s breath became rapid and broken, and her eyes darted back and forth beneath closed lids.
The Driftless Area at night, ridged and green like the folds of a blanket
Pierre skates on the lake
A child’s hand draws in blue crayon on a paper plate
A round stone flies through the air
Pierre sits sleeping in the forest, a gun across his legs
She opened her eyes, and wiped her face with the lapel of the robe, and put her hand over her hammering heart.
Carrie Miles sat down at the Jack of Diamonds and dropped her keys on the wood.
“Hey, bartender,” she said. “How about a Phillips Screwdriver.”
“Well, all right, then,” said Pierre.
He made her the drink and gave it to her with a red straw and she drank a third of it right off.
“Guess what,” she said. “Roland’s shutting me down again.”
“Since when?”
“I don’t know. A week or so.”
“How will you pay for this?”
“Good question. I can’t.”
“All right.”
“Pierre, I swear, if you told me right now I could snap my fingers and make him disappear, I would do it.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
She set the drink down, raised her hands on either side of her face, and snapped her fingers.
“You’d feel like shit if he really disappeared.”
“Well, he’s not going to, so it doesn’t matter.”
“He gets mad, you get mad, it’s a vicious cycle.”
“He told you he was mad.”
“He mentioned something about the car.”
“Well, yes. The car. And fuck him. He should marry that if he loves it so much.”
“That you hit a gas pump.”
“No. A cement post at the gas station that’s, like, the most deceptive post ever. So he says no money until that’s fixed.”
“You work. Why don’t you just cash your check?”
“Oh, because we have this idiotic system, which I let him talk me into a long time ago. That if one of us makes more than the other, they’re entitled to everything the other one makes. But they have to dole it out fairly, of course. Like it’s fair that I don’t even have five bucks for smokes.”
“Never heard of such a thing.”
“Well, according to Roland, it’s common practice among couples.”
“Hell, I’ll give you five dollars,” said Pierre. “I’ll give you fifty.”
“Really? You have that much?”
He took his billfold out and opened it. “I’ve got twenty-three dollars.”
“Give me eighteen. I don’t want to take all your money.”
Pierre counted out eighteen dollars and gave it to Carrie and put his billfold away.
“Something’s different about you,” she said.
“I graduated from beer school,” said Pierre. “That was a rite of passage.”
“Hey. Are you in love?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, Pierre Hunter. Who with?”
“Don’t tell anybody.”
“Okay.”
“Her name is Stella Rosmarin.”
Carrie shook her head. “Why is that name familiar?”
“If you’ve ever seen her you would remember.”
“No. I know what it is. It’s a kind of rose. A Rosmarin rose.”
* * *
Pierre figured it must be a well-known mistake to intervene between a wife and a husband. There were people who did that for a job and they had many years of training, and even they probably only fucked things up half the time.
But none of this was quite real. Roland and Carrie could only talk of their problems, and Pierre could only give advice, in a joking way.
You learned this as a bartender—to humor people in their troubles rather than get all sincere about them. It might have been that the humoring was better anyway. It might let people think things were not so bad and therefore could be worked out. That’s what a lot of people came to a bar for anyway.
Of course, what the counselor in beer school had said was that if you drink to make things seem not so bad then those same things will seem worse than ever in the middle of the night when the alcohol burns off.
The counselor would not concede that alcohol had any function at all beyond blind destruction. He made liquor seem like a totally inexplicable historical development.
Once in a class Pierre said what seemed obvious to him, that a few drinks enabled people to drop their inhibitions and talk. Even though, yes, there might be—there are—healthier ways to do that. But the counselor reacted as if Pierre had said that a few drinks enabled people to flap their arms and fly like birds.
And everyone in the class sided with the counselor, as they did not want to be held back for another session.
Anyway, the next time Pierre saw Roland—at the Family Lanes bowling alley in Rainville—he told him to quit hoarding the money.
“This is a person who works for a living, in America where, for all its many faults, you do get your money,” said Pierre. “She doesn’t have five dollars for cigarettes.”
“Oh, yeah, the cigarettes,” said Roland. “That makes sense as a point of speaking. But who is she smoking with? That’s the question.”
“Why? Who is she smoking with?”
“How about it’s that kid who works on the golf carts, which is why they don’t work, because he’s standing around breathing smoke on Carrie all the time.”
“You’re just jealous,” said Pierre.
“Of course I am,” said Roland. “You know how cute she is.”
Pierre made his approach and laid down a green-marbled bowling ball that went on to pick up a seven-ten spare.
“Well, anyway, you owe me eighteen bucks,” he said.
The summer came on hot and still. Cars on gravel raised clouds of dust that could be seen for miles, and the sun seemed to develop a personal interest in anyone who moved beneath it.
Boaters and swimmers flocked to Lens Lake and business picked up at the Jack of Diamonds, owing to its quiet and powerful air conditioning. The dark bar was a good place to be on hot nights, and the red leatherette chairs were gone, replaced by wooden ones from Italy.
One night after work, Pierre went to see Stella. It was around two in the morning when he got there. The treetops framed a column of sky, into which the little house seemed poised to take off, and the moon cast soft blue light on the clapboards.
Pierre shut the car off and walked across the thick and uncut grass. It was still hot, 80 degrees or more. He had no idea whether Stella would welcome him at this time of night. She had said to come back anytime but Pierre had a hard time trusting signs of attraction unless they were totally transparent.
He had left himself an out by bringing her something.
It was a model boat he had made. It seemed fairly idiotic, now that he was here and holding the boat in his hands. But at least if she did not want him to stay he could say he only meant to drop it off and be on his way.
The house was dark except for two lights, one on the stove panel in the kitchen and one upstairs. And of course there was no car. Had she cleared out entirely, the place might look exactly this way.
He knocked and after a moment heard a noise from the second floor. The screen window hinged at the top and Stella had pushed it open and was looking down.
“Pierre?” she said.
“Hi,” he said. “Is it too late?”
“Come up,” she said. “The door’s unlocked.”
He walked into the house, waited a moment, and climbed the stairs. She stood in the doorway with the light of the room behind her. She wore a little more than she had the last time he saw her but because it was underwear it was more exciting.
Funny how that works, thought Pierre.
“Here,” he said. “I made this for you.”
She lifted the boat in her hands and closed one eye to look down the hull. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
“It’s a replica of what they call the Gokstad ship,” said Pierre. “That’s all wood, by the way. Well, except the sail, of course, is cloth.”
“This would be the Vikings?”
“Yeah. They think it was a burial ship built around the year nine hundred.”
“And you made this?” she said.
“Yeah. You can have it if you want.”
“Christ, I love it,” she said.
They went into the bedroom, where she set the boat on the dresser. There were sixteen oars on either rail and they were angled downward to enable the model to stand on its own.
“I’ll put it here where I can look at it and think of you putting it together.”
“It’s kind of stupid, but—”
“No, it’s not,” said Stella. “You don’t have to feel that way. Pierre, listen to me. Whatever is bad, you didn’t cause it. You can feel good if you want to.”
She raised her hands with fingers apart as if she had counted ten things. “Wouldn’t that be better? Isn’t that what you want?”
He laced his fingers in hers. “I want you,” he said. “And there, I’ve said it.”
Still holding Pierre’s hands, Stella drew her arms back, pulling the two of them together, and she pressed his hands to the small of her back.
It was very graceful, how she did that. He could feel the ribbed cloth of her undershirt and the hem of it and the warm skin beneath.
“You’re the one I’ve been waiting for,” she said.
A woman had once told Pierre that men mistake sex for love, or maybe it was love for sex, he could not remember how it went, and maybe that only proved her point. But he thought there should be love in it, or created by it, and maybe this was why he hadn’t slept with too many people.
Of course it wasn’t always what it could be. Sometimes there was a disappointing sense of a favor being granted, and reluctantly at that, a sense of calculation and separation, and this reduced the experience from ecstatic union to a hybrid of gymnastics and accounting, and all in all it could be kind of tense and gloomy.
With Stella it was not like that. She was wild and lovely and drew no line between what she gave and what she took. She wanted and Pierre wanted what they were after equally, or sometimes one a little more, and sometimes the other, and the differences gave way to creativity rather than isolation.
And what were they after? It was not only the good feeling of friction and slide, though that was much of it. Maybe there was a time before individual minds when sensation fell on the world and all knew it the same. It was something like that. To find that time and live it one night. To join together, as in the wedding vows. It was like the word that Pierre had spoken of that time he was drunk—which time, there were so many—the word that would say everything, and the word was the sound of breathing.
They made love all through the night. It was hot in the room and then cooler as the early morning drifted in the windows, until at last they shivered under the covers, played out and a little deranged. There was a light on, a standing lamp with an orange shade. The wiring was bad and it kept going on and off. Sometimes it would stay on for a while and then again it would strobe, and the light in its changeable modes seemed to urge them on. And they would sleep, but lightly, each with the awareness of the other held close.
Once they woke and they were still together and she lay on him with her hands touching his face and her head beneath his chin.
“So, what are you doing this summer?” she said, and he could feel the vibration of her voice in his chest.
They laughed. She rose on her golden arms and looked at him.
“You mean like a vacation?” he said.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“I usually go to California in August. A cousin of mine lives out there with her family. But I don’t know if I will this year.”
“Why not?”
“Well, see, I hitchhike.”
“But you have a car.”
“It would never make it. It’s too far. And you can actually go faster without one, because you don’t have to stop. But I don’t know. I’m twenty-four now. Getting kind of old for it.”
“Twenty-four is nothing.”
“And besides, you’re here.”
“You should do whatever you were going to do,” said Stella. “Don’t not go for me. And then you can come back and tell me the stories.”
“I’ve wanted this since the day we met,” said Pierre. “Even on the day we met.”
“You were so cold.”
“I’ve forgotten.”
“I remember everything.”
“That’s quite a lot.”
“Some things I’d just as soon forget.”
“This helps, though, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, because it’s only us.”
“And who are we again?”
“A guy and a gal, lost together in this funky world.”
“How pretty you say that.”
“We should take it slow,” she said. “Really slow—like this—until it’s just unbearable. . . .”
At around five o’clock the light began to seep into the room and the birds to sing in tentative phrases as if to find out who else was awake. Pierre got up and shut off the erratic lamp, and as he did so he got a shock that leaped all the way to his shoulder. He walked back to the bed, kneading his knuckles, and then they went to sleep and did not get up until the afternoon.
“I heard you had one cart,” said Roland Miles. “Carrie seen you in the store.”
“So?”
“Well, you know what that means.”
They were up on the stone tower in the state forest behind the Jack of Diamonds. Roland was patching the mortar between the stones where it had cracked to white ash and fallen out, and Pierre was leaning on the wall and looking out over the country.
“Two people, one cart,” said Roland.
“No, what does it mean?” said Pierre.
“That you’re living together.”
“What if we are?”
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Okay, then.”
“I took her to get some groceries.”
“How kind of you. Carrie said you were in the hair care aisle and looking pretty goddamned cozy.”
“She should’ve come over.”
“Well, you know—you don’t want to interrupt people when they’re deciding which conditioner gives that allover shiny feeling.”
“I like her.”
“That’s good,” said Roland. “You should like someone. It’s the way people are. And she likes you?”
“Seems that way.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure,” said Pierre. “There’s some deer down here.”
“What are they doing?”
“Just walking around. Now they’re running.”
“Any fawns?”
“I don’t think so.”
“They’re probably near, they usually are. . . . I’m not saying you’re on the bottom of the barrel. I’m sure you would stand out to somebody, just given how many people there are, and the laws of probability.”
“Yep,” said Pierre. “It’s a mystery.”
“Well, don’t listen to me.”
“I’m not.”
“I can see that.”
Pierre had learned something in college that he always remembered, and this was that everything that succeeds creates the conditions for its own demise.
A professor with a prematurely bent posture and white beard had said this about an ancient kingdom that had disappeared, and Pierre thought it was true of many things.
A simple example would be a fire, which burns the fuel that feeds it and goes out. Supposedly this would even happen to the sun. Or a hero, who rights some great wrong and finds that his services are no longer needed.
It was the only philosophy that he had, although he was not sure it was philosophy. It meant that nothing sufficiently good or bad can last. The only things that might last are things that make no difference.
Yet it was like Pierre to magnify simple questions into large abstractions about which nothing could be done. All he meant in thinking of this formula for dissolution was that if he and Stella moved in together, they would put an end to the living apart that made them want to live together in the first place.
So he never raised the issue, and neither did Stella. They spent many nights at her hilltop house and one at his apartment in Shale before he left on his trip to California. These nights and mornings seemed so luminous and urgent as to exist separately from the rest of his life. It was as if they were beginning the world from nothing every time they met. Where had he been all this time? That was the question that went through his mind when he and Stella were together. And where was he now?