There was a note on a Post-it stuck to the refrigerator door. I had been looking for it. From the instant I found her and her car gone, I knew that she had not simply taken a drive or run an errand. There was an emptiness in the house that felt deep and permanent, as though Laura had never been here, loneliness like a scar. Somehow you know when someone close to you is gone and is not coming back. There is no lingering sense of their presence.
“Gone to L.A. to see Pring,” the note, in Laura’s round script, distorted here by haste and pain, said. “I’ve got to change his mind about this. I’ve got to get things straight. I can’t stand it until I do. Be back with him when he comes in a few days. Caretaker will take you anywhere you want to go; I’ve already been up to ask him. He’s going over toward Palo Alto anyway today so you can take Glynn as planned. And he’ll show you around or let you borrow his Jeep anytime. Sorry, Met. Rest and relax and I’ll have it all worked out when Pring and I come back.”
It was signed, simply, L.
I sat down in the kitchen and held the note in my hands, looking blindly out at the morning sun filtering in pools through the great trees overhead. I knew that she would not have it all worked out when she and Caleb Pringle came back in a few days. I would have bet my house on the river back home that she would come back in shattered fragments and he would not come at all. I felt, in that moment, simply defeated. Emptied out and flattened as if I had been run over. All this way, all this time, all this chaos and anger behind me, all the small, frail bonds to Laura that had been painfully reestablished torn loose, all the anguish and damage ahead of her, all the old destructiveness reignited. What was I going to do about her? How could I pick these pieces up; what could I pick these pieces up; what could I do with a near-mortally wounded sister and an unborn baby? I crumpled the note and threw it onto the kitchen table.
I could think of nothing and felt little but the great, smothering white fatigue, and so I made coffee and put on my jeans and found a heavy sweater in the bureau and pulled that on, and took my coffee and went out into the morning.
The clearing the lodge sat in was an old one, I thought; there were no stumps, no new-turned earth or fresh-planted grass, no sign that the redwoods that leaned over it had ever been disturbed. The back of the house faced up the mountain. There was the gravel driveway we had come in on last night, and a turnaround, and a three-car garage beyond it. All of the spaces were empty. The house itself sat on the crest of a long ridge below the major crest that spined the area; that was where, if I remembered correctly, the old fire tower and the scattered machinery had been. T.C. Bridgewater’s lair.
The front of the house looked out over space. I had not seen, because of last night’s fog, what might lie below the great bank of windows. Now, walking out onto the long deck off the kitchen and the window wall, I did. Trees. Shafts of pale sunlight through fog and trees. Ridge after forested ridge, dropping away toward the unseen coast, an undulating surf of green. I thought that I had never seen so much green, not even in the Georgia river bottoms in a damp spring. This place might be the very heart of all the earth’s wild places; the master tree for all the others in the world might well be one of these redwoods.
I had never seen anything living so tall. My head tipped back to look and my eyes went up, and up, and up. At the tops, where open evergreen crowns let the morning sunlight through, the sky seemed infinitely far away, a pale, distant blue, like the surface of the sea seen from its bottom. Layers of fog drifted through the trees, giving them the look of something seen through stage scrim, unreal, haunted, primal. Other trees huddled under their shoulders; I recognized fir, alders, and oak. There were great tangles of rhododendron and laurel crowding the nearer trees at ground level, and huge ferns, and tiny, starlike flowers ranging from delicate pink to purple. The fog and mist hugged the ground and blew in skeins and scarves; the top of the trees were in constant slight motion. I felt no wind, but I heard it, last night’s ancient soughing, the breathing of the trees, the sound of this vast sea of silence. I realized I was holding my breath only when I let it out. In all the world I had never seen anything so strangely, inhumanly beautiful. In this place, man would soon seem simply extraneous. I shivered. I did not think I would feel welcome for long in this world where the very earth spasmed and the great trees would not acknowledge my presence. In the storms of winter, I thought, it must be a profoundly hostile place to be.
But on this morning its archaic beauty was benign, and a ray of sun shifted and found me on the deck, and I sat in it and drank coffee and emptied my mind. When Glynn got up, then I would get hold of myself and see what could be done and prod myself into action. I might go after Laura or get hold of Stuart Feinstein and ask him to do it, or Glynn and I might simply ask T. C. Bridgewater to take us to the San Francisco airport, where we would get on the next available flight home. There were lots of options. I would address them soon. When Glynn got up.
It was almost an hour later when she did. By then the woods had done their work. When Glynn came shuffling barefoot out onto the deck, rubbing at her eyes and dragging her blanket, and said, “I read Aunt Laura’s note. What are we going to do?” I said, not moving my eyes from the still surf of the trees, “I don’t know.”
She stared at me, and I realized that she did not know how to respond. I was not, in that moment, Mama, or even Mom. Either of those women would be planning, bustling, readying for action. But here I sat with my hands folded in my lap and my eyes drowned in woods and silence.
“Mom?” she ventured, trying anyway.
“Come, sit,” I said, and patted the redwood chaise beside me. I did not send her back to put on her shoes and sweater, or get up to fix her breakfast.
“Sit still and just look,” I smiled at her. “Don’t talk. Just let it fill you up. We’ll never see anything like this again. It’s worth the trip just to sit on this deck for an hour.”
She looked, dutifully, but presently she began to shiver, and that brought me back a little way.
“Put some clothes on and we’ll talk about it,” I said. “Are you hungry?”
“Yeah,” she said, sounding surprised. “I think I am.”
Inside, the enchantment of the place lessened, and by the time she came back in pants and a heavy ski sweater similar to mine, I had made toast and scrambled eggs and fried bacon from the cache T.C. Bridgewater had brought. She ate a helping of everything and had a second piece of toast. It had been so long since she had eaten like that, in my presence at least, that I could only watch her in silence, not wanting to break the spell with words.
Finally she grinned at me and said, “Not even a Jewish mother could complain about that.”
“You’ll hear no complaints from me,” I said. “What, besides toast and eggs, has gotten into you?”
“Well, I guess it’s the air or something. And then Caleb said I needed to gain a few pounds, that Joan was a sturdy, blooming peasant girl, not a starved, watery waif. He said nobody would want to put the move on me with all my bones sticking out, especially not the Dauphine of France.”
I flinched, hating the casual perversion of the words, angry at Caleb Pringle for dangling the role over my daughter when I had told him she would not be playing it.
“You know what we said about Joan,” I said. “It’s out of the question, Glynn.”
“Oh, I know. But he made me see how I must look to other people. A watery waif? Yecchh. And you know, food does taste good up here. I was afraid I’d throw up, but it really tastes good.”
I dropped it, thankful to whatever detoxified the thought of food for her, but still meaning to get her out of Caleb Pringle’s orbit as soon as possible.
“I thought we’d leave for Palo Alto as soon as I do the dishes and you pack some things,” I said. “Mr. Bridgewater is going to take us over to Marcie’s dad’s house. Aunt Laura asked him before she left.”
“You mean I can still go?” Joy lit her face. “I thought sure we’d be going home today, or back to L.A. after Aunt Laura. Can I stay as long as we said?”
“You can stay until Aunt Laura gets back. I can’t leave until I know what’s going on with her. I’m sure she’ll call before long, at least. We’ll decide then.”
“She said she’d be back with Caleb when he came—”
“I wouldn’t count on Caleb,” I said.
She dropped her eyes. “I know he can explain all this,” she said softly. “I know he didn’t mean to hurt her. He’s a good person, Mom. They’ll work it all out.”
Dear Lord, she does have a crush on him, I thought bleakly. Maybe I’ll put her on a plane in a day or two and wait here for Laura. Ina could look after Glynn.
But then I remembered that Ina did not work for us anymore. Pom and Mommee came flooding back into my head, along with all of the strife boiling around them; how could I have forgotten? The trees; somehow the green trees had sucked them from my mind along with all the other effluvia of home. I was not ready to go back to things the way they were, I thought clearly, and I did not want Glynn to go back to them, either.
“There are some women’s clothes in my bureau,” she said. “Really cool things. Some of them look like they’d fit me. Do you think Caleb would mind if I took some of them to Palo Alto? I’d get them cleaned. I don’t really have much—”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t,” I said dryly. “I doubt if their owners will be back for them.”
She looked at me, but vanished to her packing without speaking. I was not surprised that Caleb Pringle’s house would be full of the clothes of cast-off women, but it annoyed me. If he cared for Laura he would put them away. But maybe it was not one of the things that mattered to Laura, or to a man like Caleb Pringle. And it was none of my affair. I would wear the clothes in my bureau gratefully; I had nothing with me for the chill morning breath of these mountains.
I remembered then that I had promised to call and tell Pom where we were, so I put on a red-and-black plaid wool shirt I found hanging on a peg behind the door and called out to Glynn where I was going and went out again into the chill, soft morning. The white fog was thickening and drifting higher into the trees, and by the time I reached the turn in the gravel road the sun had vanished altogether.
It was like walking through a Japanese watercolor. The edges of everything were faded and blurred, but a few details—the feathery lower branches of the redwoods, the dry-brush tips of the great ferns, here and there a stump or a boulder with its base wreathed in flowers and more fern fronds—swam into focus now and then, as sharp and clear as if they were emerging from developing fluid. The fog stilled the sound of the rustling undergrowth and the calls of the morning birds, even my footsteps in the gravel. I saw only the close-pressing walls of a shifting green tunnel, heard only the ever-present sighing of the silence. I could not see anything off to my left that resembled the tower and its outbuildings, and it seemed to me that I had walked much further than we had driven last night. Could I have missed a turn? How? I had seen no other path or road turning off this one.
But a cold emptiness crept in around my heart, the viscerally remembered feeling of the first awful lostness when one is a child. Something heavy thumped in the dense stand of wet black trunks not too far from the path, and then began crashing through undergrowth. I froze on the path, hardly breathing, unable to tell if the sound was coming closer or retreating. What had Caleb said about the wild things here? Bear? Mountain lions? Some sort of elk? Deer, foxes, porcupines, skunks, raccoons? Rattus rattus, of course. I was certainly not eager to meet a bear or a mountain lion alone on this fog-haunted trail from nowhere to nowhere, and not particularly eager to meet any of the others, no matter how benign. Who knew how these spectral woods changed living things? Look what they had done to me.
The crashing stopped abruptly, and I began to run, stumbling and sliding.
I heard the barking before I saw the dog. It rang out through the fog like the Hound of the Baskervilles’ cry, and I stopped dead, too frightened to run. It was a hollow, terrible sound. Almost instantly the dog was out of the fog and upon me, huge and slavering and smelling rankly of wildness and wet dog. Before I could cry out it had jumped up on me with its huge paws and I stumbled and fell backward, and it bent over me, snuffling and nosing for my throat. I was just taking a deep breath to scream when I heard a man’s sharp command: “Curtis! Carpe diem!” The dog stopped his business with my throat, which I realized only then had been a wet, energetic mopping of my face with a huge tongue. Carpe diem? I had surely gone mad with the sheer, inhuman strangeness of this place.
T. C. Bridgewater was suddenly beside me, looming up out of the fog like Paul Bunyan in his black beard and lank-hanging hair and checked shirt. He knelt and peered at me, one arm around the dog’s neck. The dog sat leaning against him, red tongue lolling, grinning the lupine grin of a canine in perfect harmony with his world. When I sat up he gave a soft woof, sending a warm gust of meaty breath into my face. It was the smell of home: Alpo. I fed it to Samson and Delilah.
“Are you okay?” T. C. Bridgewater said, clumsily brushing at the dirt on my jacket and pants. “He heard you before I did and was out of there before I could catch him. Sorry if he scared you. He wouldn’t hurt you. Curtis loves to have visitors.”
“I can see that he does,” I said, too grateful for the presence of Caleb’s hermit to be angry. Fear usually does that to me, but not this fey white morning.
“I was expecting you,” he said, taking my hand and pulling me to my feet. “Your sister said you needed to make some phone calls and then you’d be wanting to take your daughter over to Palo Alto a little later on. Come on up; I made another pot of coffee.”
“I don’t want to put you out,” I said formally. My knees were stiff from the fall, and there were gravel abrasions on the heels of my hands that were beginning to sting. “I know you don’t go out often. After this I promise I won’t bother you.”
“It’s no bother. I welcome any excuse to get out and about. It’s hard work, being a hermit,” he said, striding ahead of me. The dog Curtis brought up the rear, panting companionably. Every now and then he nosed my thigh gently as if to tell me that he was behind me and all was well.
A formless group of shapes loomed out of the fog as we climbed the trail, and I remembered the anonymous machinery from last night, and the bulky vehicle. We stepped up to a near invisible wooden deck, low and broad, and I saw that there were deck chairs and a couple of worn chaises there, and an umbrella table, and dishes and bowls sitting under a rusty water tap. Curtis’s dining room. The deck circled the base of the tower, and at one end a canvas overhang had been rigged, and a hammock and a table spilling over with books sat under it, along with a spindly-legged black steel grill and a sagging old sofa, also spilling its cargo of books. The sofa had an untidy nest of blankets on it. It was plain that T. C. Bridgewater did much of his living here. Perhaps it was his summer home. The little house atop the tower had seemed very small last night. I would, I thought, want a place in which to drink in the wildness clear of walls and a ceiling, too.
“I hate to make you do it,” he said over his shoulder, “but you’ll have to climb the tower to use the phone. I keep thinking I’ll get one of those cellular things, but I forget…watch your step. It’s better than a ladder, but only just.”
He was right. I grasped the stout railings and began to climb the steep, long staircase behind him, feeling dizzily that I was climbing into nothing. After a moment or so I lost sight of his legs and feet in the fog. Behind me I could hear the scratch of Curtis’s toenails on the weathered wood, and his panting. Even with a landing, the climb seemed endless. I wondered if Curtis often bothered.
Just as I was beginning to tire, my head and shoulders broke through the fog and I gasped. We were only a step or two from the top of the tower, and as far as I could see on every side, the fog rolled away in billows and waves, a silent silver-white sea, pricked with the ghostly tops of the redwoods. The sunlight here was fresh and strong and struck such light off the fog that I slitted my eyes involuntarily against it. It was spectacular. We were literally bathed in strange, radiant, sun-and-fog light, and the air was many degrees warmer than on the ground and smelled of pine with the sun on it.
I followed him into the single small, square room and Curtis heaved himself in behind me and flopped gratefully on the floor. The room was perhaps fifteen by fifteen feet, and all its walls were windows. A skylight opened the flat roof to the sky, and the whole thing seemed to sway slightly with the unseen, unceasing wind. It was strange to hear the voice of the wind coming from below us, but on this ridgetop there were few of the huge redwoods, and the other trees did not reach us. The tower sat in a clearing, and I remembered that its original use was that of a fire tower. I thought that from here, when the fog had lifted, you could see a fire a hundred miles away in any direction. Now we saw only the endless floor of fog and the tops of the redwoods, rising and falling on their ridges until they met the hidden sea.
I stood looking, turning around in a circle.
“I think I might never leave it,” I said.
“I don’t, much,” he said. “So you like it?”
“Yes. Well…I don’t know. I live in the woods at home, but they’re so much tamer. Lower, and more open. I live on a river bank, but it’s a gentle river. I don’t know.…I’m so used to having hidey holes and little nooks and crannies around me, places you can go and feel snug and hidden; safe places. Up here you couldn’t hide from anything, ever. It’s beautiful, but I don’t know if I’d ever get used to it.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “When I first came up here I was like a cat trying to make a home on a roof. I couldn’t settle down and get comfortable. I put up curtains to shut everything out, and built the deck down there just so I could get down on ground level once in a while. I spent a lot of time in bed with the covers pulled up over my head. It was winter then; I thought I’d made an awful mistake. But by the time spring came I couldn’t stand walls around me anymore, and got antsy when I was shut up in rooms, and so I took down the curtains and put in the skylight. It gets to you. You get so you can’t live with anything between you and the wildness.”
He walked over to a tile counter where a coffeemaker stood, next to a small microwave oven and a neat little convection oven. There was a miniature sink, too, and a tiny refrigerator sat underneath the counter. It all occupied only one of the walls, a model of compactness and planning. But it was wildly, baroquely messy. On the other walls were waist-high wooden counters with bookshelves under them or drawers. An open space with a chair in it made a desk. A double bed was placed at an angle to one corner, piled high with colored pillows and draped with what looked to be a beautiful old Chief Joseph blanket. A tall, skinny armoire stood opposite it in the other corner. A big, black cast iron stove occupied the middle of the room, vented out the skylight, and there were big floor pillows and a wooden box of firewood ranged around it. The bed looked directly at the glass door where the flames would dance, and I thought that even on the coldest winter night, with the Pacific gales howling and sleet and snow spitting against the windows and the skylight, that bed and indeed this whole room must be as warm as a small animal’s burrow. The room was, somehow, an enchantment. It had the charm of a child’s playhouse, but the particular and intimate air of someone’s real home, an adult one. There were books literally everywhere, and in front of one of the windows a big telescope was drawn up.
“What a perfect aerie,” I said, taking a cup of coffee from him. I sat down on the edge of his bed. There was nowhere else to sit. He had sunk cross-legged to one of the big pillows, and Curtis lay sprawled on the other, giving occasional little groans of contentment. He promptly went to sleep.
The coffee was hot and strong. I sipped it gratefully. The stove was not lit, and the room still held the chill of the thin air and the fog.
“I could light a fire,” T.C. said. “But I figured you’d want to call and then get on the road over to Palo Alto. By the time things warmed up we’d be gone again. Wrap that blanket around you. I’ll hand the phone over to you; one advantage of this place is that the phone reaches anywhere in it. I’ll go on back down if you need privacy.”
“No. I don’t,” I said, though I would have liked it. If Pom were in the same mood as yesterday, it would not be an easy call.
He brought me the phone and turned away to the counter where the sink was, clattering ostentatiously as he cleared away some of the mess. I dialed Pom’s office. Only when Amy answered in her DAR chirrup did I realize how much I had hoped the chatty temp would be the one to answer. I sighed, not caring if Amy heard it.
“Well, well, Merritt,” Amy said. “Where are we today? Hollywood? Disneyland?”
They were, I thought in annoyance, the only places Amy knew in California.
“We’re up in redwood country,” I said. “It’s very beautiful. We’re in a lodge owned by a friend of Laura’s. Ah…is Pom in?”
“I’m afraid not. Doctor has been out of the office for the past day or two. There’s a visiting team of UN doctors he’s been showing around; from Zaire or somewhere. The CDC asked him to do it. It’s quite an honor. They’re staying over the weekend so he’ll probably be tied up. I’ll be glad to take a message, though.”
I’ll just bet you will, I thought.
“Just tell him the lodge where we’re staying is in the Big Basin State Park below San Francisco. It’s about thirty minutes from Palo Alto, I think, in the Santa Cruz mountains. If he needs to reach us he can call this number. It’s the caretaker’s phone. There’s not a phone in the lodge, but we’ll get the message. We should be home in a few days. I’ll know for sure in a day or two, and I’ll call him.”
I read her out the number and heard the scratching of her pen as she wrote it down.
“You’d probably better call me,” she said creamily. “Doctor is entertaining the team in the evenings. One of them used to work here; do you remember that stunning Jamaican doctor we had for a year or two a while back? She’s the team chief. We were all glad to see her again. Everyone thought the world of her.”
“I remember,” I said. My heart began to pound. “How nice for you all. Well, if you’ll tell Pom—”
“Oh, I will. Don’t you worry about Doctor. We’ve got things well in hand now. He’s feeling much better.”
I hope you come down with jungle rot, I wanted to tell her, but instead I hung up smartly. I had not, I realized, asked about Mommee, and had a crazy mental image of her presiding over a Mad Hatter’s tea party for the beloved black doctor and her team. I sat staring at the phone for a moment, and then turned to T. C. Bridgewater with a tight smile. He had his back to me, splashing in the sink.
“All set,” I said brightly.
He turned, studying me for a moment.
“Everything okay?” he said.
“Just fine.”
“Then why don’t you go on back down and get whatever you need and I’ll come collect you and your daughter in about half an hour. We can pick up anything else you need in Palo Alto and maybe have some lunch. The fog will be burned off by noon. It should be a good day; we’ve had a long string of them. You’re lucky. Usually there’s nonstop fog this time of year.”
“Fog’s pretty much all I’ve seen since we got here.”
“This is nothing. Morning stuff. I’ve never seen spring weather like we’ve been having, not this warm and dry. It’s been a strange spring all over.”
I remembered the maverick climatologist who had stirred up all the earthquake madness. I had not heard a radio or seen a TV or newspaper in days; I wondered if the media was still full of him. Uneasiness stirred in my stomach like a little snake.
“Have you been hearing all the earthquake talk?” I asked. “That guy who’s predicting the big one? Most people I talk to pooh-pooh it, but you have to wonder.…Wasn’t that bad one a few years ago that collapsed the freeway bridge in San Francisco around here somewhere?”
“Loma Prieta,” he said. “Yeah. Not too far. The epicenter was in a place called the Forest of Nicene Marks, about twelve miles from here. But the conventional wisdom says that the seismic gap up here was filled by that one and there won’t be another in these parts for a long, long time.”
Something in his voice made me look sharply at him.
“Is that what you think?”
“No. But then I’m a long way from being a real earthquake scientist. I’m more an obsessed dilettante. The big guys all say you’re probably safer up here than you would be anywhere else in California.”
“Somehow I don’t think you believe that, either.”
“Well, I do believe you’re safe for the length of time you’ll be here. Caleb said just a few days, didn’t he? There’s no indication anything’s that near blowing.”
“You study earthquakes, don’t you?”
“Well, I do, but I’m an amateur and my equipment’s not very sophisticated. Some of it I made myself. All I’ve got is a theory and some back-of-the-neck feelings. No seismologist worth his salt would give me the time of day. Really, don’t worry about earthquakes. If I thought you all were in immediate danger I’d get you out of here.”
“Then I won’t,” I said. “Thanks for the coffee and the phone. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
He walked me to the door, and when he opened it the fog swirled in. It was still as thick as whipped cream.
“I’m going to send Curtis back with you,” he said. “He knows the way as well as I do. He’s good company and a good guard dog. When you get there, just send him home. Say, ‘Curtis, go home. Carpe diem.’ He’ll come straight home. But you have to say ‘carpe diem.’”
“What is this ‘carpe diem’ business?” I said, smiling at Curtis, who thumped his feathery tail on the floor. He was mostly Lab, I thought, a big, chunky brown dog with a thick coat that curled a little in the dampness, and sweet yellow-brown eyes. He seemed to smile at me.
“I taught him that as a kind of code,” T.C. said. “He’s such a big old pussycat that I was afraid he’d go off with literally anybody who whistled for him, so I taught him never to obey anybody unless they said ‘carpe diem’ to him. He’ll obey me without it, but I’m the only one.”
“But why ‘carpe diem’? Is he a fan of Horace’s?”
“It’s kind of my slogan. A statement of philosophy, I guess. Forget the past; let tomorrow happen. Seize the day.”
“Not a bad philosophy.”
“It’s the only way to live. Okay, you try it. Say, ‘Curtis, come. Carpe diem.’”
“Curtis, come. Carpe diem,” I said obediently, feeling silly. But the big dog got up lazily and padded over to me and stood beside me, looking up expectantly. I gave the silky ears a tickle and he grinned, his red tongue lolling.
“You’re in business,” T.C. said, and I went out into the fog, the dog padding beside me. All the way down the white-shrouded path he stayed just at my knee, bumping me softly when I strayed close to the verge, panting slightly as if he were breathing with me, telling me, “I am here and it’s all right.” It was ridiculously comforting, like having a trusted person with you in an unknown place.
“Curtis, you are A-okay in my book,” I said, when he had delivered me to the back door of the lodge.
Glynn was waiting in the kitchen and saw him, and came running out with her arms outstretched.
“Is it Curtis?” she cried in rapture. “It must be Curtis! Oh, you wonderful, wonky old guy! Hello, Curtis! Oh, good boy!”
Curtis gave a soft woof of happiness and started toward her, but then sat down and looked anxiously up at me.
“Go ahead, Curtis,” I said. “Carpe diem.”
And he flew into Glynn’s arms as if they were magnetized for large dogs. It was as pure a case of mutual love at first sight as I have ever seen. When I said, presently, “Okay, Curtis, go home now. Home. Carpe diem,” he looked at me so miserably, and whined so softly and plaintively, that I relented.
“Okay, you can stay. Your daddy will think we kidnapped you, but you can stay till he comes to pick us up. Stay, Curtis. Carpe diem.”
He followed Glynn into her bedroom when she went to finish packing. When I looked in on them he was curled up on her bed and she lay beside him, one arm around the great neck. She grinned up at me.
“I even knew what he would feel like in bed,” she said. “He’s just the big old bed-dog I always wanted.”
“Don’t fall hopelessly in love with him; it’ll break your heart when we have to go home,” I said. “We’ll look at Lab puppies when we get back.”
“Really, really?”
“Really, really,” I said recklessly. Mommee could like it or lump it. So could Pom.
Oh, Pom…
The trip to Palo Alto was as carefree as a vacation drive. I suspected, from the delight T.C. Bridgewater took in showing us the giant trees and the strange fauna and flora along the way, that he didn’t leave the tower often, and almost never in the presence of people. He was as excited as we were at the strange, wonderful sights and sounds and smells of the Big Basin, almost like a small boy, and when he was not tour-guiding he was regaling us with legends and stories of the Santa Cruz mountains, and told scurrilous and improbable stories about the old mountain men who had once lived here, along with the very rich men from the cities who had built the great lodges and houses and about their present owners. Glynn, in the backseat with her arm around Curtis, laughed her froggy, infectious belly laugh so often that both T.C. and I were often helpless with laughter along with her. I still don’t remember if his stories were that funny, but I do remember that for the thirty or so minutes that it took us to wind down through the wet green mountains into Palo Alto, we were mostly laughing.
When we reached Marcie’s father’s house, a rambling old yellow Victorian on a tree-shaded street bordering the Stanford golf course, I felt that I had known this drawling, loose-jointed man all my life. Glynn was calling him T.C. and telling him about our stay in Los Angeles, and Arc, and the screen test, and how Marcie and Jessica were going to simply die when they saw her tape. She was just launching into her father’s objections to our odyssey when I turned around and gave her a level look. I did not like to discourage her obvious liking for Caleb Pringle’s hermit, but I did not want her to say anything to him that she would regret later, either. When Glynn’s shyness broke, it was such a rare and apparently comforting phenomenon that she talked nonstop. I had not seen it happen often. Sometimes, afterward, she sat cringing far into the night, embarrassed at her own loquacity. I did not want that to happen with T.C. I wanted her to remember him with the simple, unvarnished liking that I was feeling for him myself. And besides, I was oddly loathe to talk about Pom. He had no place yet in this journey. I wanted, suddenly, to keep it all for myself. Glynn caught my look and flushed and fell silent. But then she saw Marcie and Jess standing on the ornate old porch, already jumping up and down and squealing, and the flush faded, and she was out of the Jeep and running and squealing before T.C. brought it to a stop.
In the seat behind us Curtis whined.
“Sorry, old boy,” T.C. said, “it’s the way they are. Genetic, probably. They just can’t help it. Love you and leave you. She’ll be back. Meanwhile, here’s another pretty lady up here waiting to comfort you. Take your pleasures where you find them, my man.”
I reached over and scratched Curtis’s ears and he broke into the contented panting again. I started to get out of the Jeep and go to meet Marcie’s stepmother, who had come out onto the porch, and then stopped.
“Aren’t you coming?” I said to T.C.
“What on earth for? So those somewhat overexcited young things can go back to Atlanta and tell all their parents that you were consorting with the caretaker just like he was your husband? It ain’t fittin’, ma’am.”
He grinned his sudden white grin at me and I blushed furiously. I realized that I had been treating him like…well, not like the hired caretaker of the estate where I was visiting, who was accommodating me at the bidding of his employer.
I got out of the Jeep and started up the flower-bordered stone walk and looked back at him. He was leaning his black head back on the seat, eyes closed, whistling to himself, but at that moment he opened his eyes and looked squarely at me and lifted an imaginary hat and leered evilly. I went the rest of the way up the path to meet my daughter’s hostess, laughing.
I exchanged polite pleasantries with Marcie’s stepmother, a tanned young woman who looked as if she spent a lot of time on sailboats or tennis courts. I smiled hello to Marcie and Jess, who were wedged into a porch swing with Glynn, listening eagerly as she talked, no doubt, of Arc and the screen test. And then it was time to go. I felt a sudden sharp wrench at the prospect of leaving my daughter. The fact that I would now be alone in the huge, silent old woods, in the strange, rambling house of a man I scarcely knew, without a link to any world I knew except a telephone in a fairy-tale tower occupied by a skinny Paul Bunyan of a man I did not know at all, suddenly dawned on me. I had looked forward to unlimited time and silence and solitude, but now they seemed endless, engulfing, unfriendly. I could not imagine what I would do in all that empty space for all those empty hours. I glanced back at T.C. Bridgewater, suddenly as shy and wary of his presence as if I had come upon him in a dark back street in the city. I looked at him, suddenly, with city eyes. Tall, black-bearded and browed, dark-eyed, dark-skinned—a dark man who walked more easily in the wild than on pavement, a slow-talking, Indian-faced man whose soft speech hid who knew what? A man said by others to be eccentric, who said of himself that he was obsessed. I did not know this man at all. Not at all.
As if she had caught my feeling, Glynn came over to me and hugged me suddenly and fiercely. She walked me to the Jeep, her arm still around my waist.
“Tell Dad all about everything,” she said loudly. “I know you’ll be talking to him every day. I’ll bet he’ll call tonight. Tell him about the trees and the mountains and Curtis and…everything. Tell him maybe I’ll call him in a day or two. Will you tell him?”
“I’ll tell him,” I said, hugging her and feeling the edge of her bones, that were perhaps just a shade less sharp than they had been.
We drove away in silence and bounced over old cobbles toward the waterfront and an outdoor restaurant T.C. knew. He looked over at me and grinned, and said, “I think I’ve just been warned to keep my distance or her daddy will beat me up.”
“What a silly thing to say; not at all,” I said prissily, heard myself, and smiled unwillingly.
“Maybe a little,” I said. “She’s never seen me around any man but her father for any length of time. I think it never occurred to her that I would be, you know, up there alone with you, until this minute. That unsubtle little message was for me, not for you.”
“I wouldn’t think you were in the habit of making eyes at strange men,” he said.
“Well, of course I’m not. I didn’t mean she thought that. I just meant…Oh, Lord, I don’t know what I meant and I don’t feel like analyzing it. I’m not about to put the move on you and I don’t imagine for a moment that you will on me. In fact, I plan to leave you strictly alone to pursue your earthquakes. I am going to sleep prodigiously, and read enormously, and eat disgracefully, and by the time I have filled my quota of all three Laura will be back and we’ll be gone.”
“And I’ll be sorry,” he said equably. “You’re good company, you and Glynn, and I’ve enjoyed this morning with both of you. And Curtis is as lovesick as a puppy. Like I said, conquer and run. You’re all alike. Did your sister say when she’d be back, by the way?”
“No. She said she’d let me know. I don’t imagine it will be long—”
“I don’t think I’d count on that.”
I looked at him.
“The tone speaks louder than the words,” I said. “You want to tell me what you meant by that?”
“Nothing unkind. Really. I just…I’ve seen more than a few other pretty women leave that lodge like bats out of torment early in the mornings. Mostly they don’t come back. Your sister is a pretty woman and a nice one, and I don’t want you to worry about her, and I expect you do a lot of that. I think you’ve got enough on your plate right now. I want you to be able just to kick back and let the woods do what they do.”
It was an extraordinary little speech to make to a stranger, especially since much of it was uncannily accurate, and it annoyed me both in its familiarity and its accuracy.
“Do you dabble in dysfunctional family therapy too?” I said sourly.
“No, but I’m a member of a family that gives new luster to the word dysfunctional. I know the signs. I’m sorry. I spoke out of turn. Comes from being a hermit. Us hermits are the world’s worst blabbermouths if you give us a chance. Never start a conversation with a hermit or you’ll be stuck for the millennium.”
“No need to apologize. But I’d be interested to know how you knew about us—or thought you did. Us Southern women are raised never to show our true feelings in public.”
“Don’t I know that,” he said. “Well, if you really want to know, I’ll tell you over a Bloody Mary and cold crab. But not until then. I’m too faint with hunger to poke around in psyches, mine or yours.”
“If I show you my psyche, you’ve got to show me yours,” I said, feeling the morning’s easy familiarity slide back. I could, after all, I thought, tell this man anything. I could feel no harm anywhere in him. The very fact that he was a stranger and would remain one was both license and armor. I realized suddenly how very liberating anonymity was. It’s the reason, I thought, that you can talk about things to people on airplanes that you’d never tell another soul at home. There’s no context between you. Anything goes in a vacuum; the very lack of any history between you is like a shot of Demerol.
The restaurant sat hard by the south end of San Francisco Bay, next to the yacht club and marina where, Glynn had said, Marcie’s father had a membership and there was a plethora of cool boys. I tried to imagine my daughter into the scene, splashing in the azure pool that was visible over a jacaranda hedge; climbing aboard one of the sleek, white sailboats bobbing at their moorings; running in a group of wet, seal-brown adolescents toward the snack bar. I could see the Glynn I had found in California, but not the one I had left home seeking. I shook my head. I wasn’t much for Bloody Marys, and the one I was sipping was my second.
It seemed to me to be quite late. We had not gotten a table until after one, and we had drunk and talked, or sat in comfortable silence watching the very white sails on the very blue bay and the green mountains above them, for what felt like a long time. I had a nagging sense of something left undone, somewhere I had to be, but the sun was warm on my head and shoulders and the breeze was cool and soft on my face, and the flowering vines and tubs of blooms on the outdoor deck where we sat were hypnotic, and gradually the feeling faded. The vodka helped too, undoubtedly. By the time the crabs came, huge and rosy and served with lime wedges and a wonderful thyme-flavored sauce, I was almost totally a creature of indolence and sensation. I had shucked off my heavy shirt and sat in Stuart Feinstein’s “Eat Your Breakfast” tee, feeling the sun running in my veins out to the tips of my toes and fingers. I kept wanting to yawn and stretch until all my joints popped. I did a fair amount of it.
T.C. half-sat, half-slouched across from me, his feet in huge, scuffed hiking boots, propped in an empty chair, eating lime wedges. He had taken off his jacket, too, and wore a handsome, heavy Oxford cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his brown forearms. It was faded blue and became him. I knew that it was Brooks Brothers; Pom had dozens of them. For some reason that surprised me. A hermit in a Brooks Brothers button-down? He had removed the mended wire-rimmed glasses and replaced them with a pair of dark yellow aviator’s glasses, also bent and mended, that gave his coal-chip eyes the inhuman glitter of a wild animal’s. The white teeth and the black beard and hair, with red highlights glistening now in the sun, added to the impression of a predator. But his hawk’s face was slack with sun and liquor and good humor, and his smile had a singular sweetness, like a sleepy child’s. There was a scattering of tiny black freckles across the bridge of his nose; I had not noticed them before. Celt freckles; Pom had a few of them, too.
“Are you Scottish or Irish?” I asked, breaking the long, sun-humming silence.
“English as far back as the Domesday Book, or so I’m told. With some Yamacraw Indian thrown in, though nobody in my family will admit to it. I think it was one reason nobody made much of a fuss when I took off West. Sooner or later they probably would have paid me to stay away so nobody could see the Yamacraw in my face. Nobody else in the clan has it.”
He said it so mildly that I wondered if he were joking.
“Why do you ask?” he said, leaning his head so far back that it hung over the back of the Adirondack chair, leaving his throat bare. I saw that it was pale. He was not naturally dark, then, but brown with sun and wind. Again like Pom. I was obscurely glad that his eyes were black-brown and not Pom’s spotlight blue.
“My husband has those freckles and he’s a Celt,” I said, and then blushed hotly and was angry with myself for the blush. Lord, what a ninny, I thought fiercely. This is not prom night.
But he only said, “Ah,” and went on lolling his head back, eyes closed against the slanting sun. He looked as boneless and inert as a ventriloquist’s dummy that had been tossed across the chair. I sat up straighter and looked at my watch, shaking my head to clear the sweet lassitude from it. Three forty-five.
“Do you realize that we’ve sat here guzzling vodka and stuffing our faces for almost three hours?” I said.
He snapped his head back down.
“You need to get back?” he said, yawning.
“I thought I’d call Glynn—”
“Why?”
“Well…just to see that she’s settled in. Let her know where I’ve been, in case she’s tried to call—”
“I’ve got an answering machine,” he said. “Pringle won’t have a phone, but he still doesn’t want to miss the four hundred calls he gets every day. He put in the machine before I even moved in. You can call her back if she’s called.”
“It’s just that it’s the first time she’s been away from me for this long in a strange place, besides camp, and she knows everybody there.”
“She’s not going into the heart of darkness, only the heart of Palo Alto. Though they may be one and the same, at that. How old is she, anyway? Sometimes she looks twelve, and others you can see the woman she’s going to be. Some woman, too.”
“She’s sixteen,” I said curtly. Put that way, it did sound ridiculous, my fussing about my daughter.
“So why do you hover? Has she been sick? She’s awfully thin, you know. Well, of course you do. Anorexia, isn’t it?”
“Not anymore,” I said, biting my words off short and staring at him levelly. “She’s gained a good bit since she’s been out here. And yes, we’ve had treatment and therapy for her; the best. It’s working, and I wasn’t aware that I hover. How do you know so much about anorexia, anyway?”
“Oldest daughter had it. It was during the time her mother and I were going through our divorce. A bad time all the way around. She was fourteen then; she didn’t have any other weapons. We should have seen it before we did.”
“How is she now?” I said, my annoyance vanishing. So he had walked that bad road, too. Glynn’s thinness must hurt him to see. He couldn’t know how much better she was.
“She’s dead,” he said, looking down into his glass, where melting ice turned the remnants of the Bloody Mary pink.
“Oh, my God—”
“No, no. Not from the anorexia. I think we’d mostly licked that. That’s what made it so—awful. It was an automobile accident. She was with some kids driving up the Delta to a Christmas party in a town upriver, and they went straight into a semi. It was late, and the kid driving had been drinking. We should have been on top of that, too, but we were so glad she was beginning to date and go to parties that we didn’t…we should have talked to her, of course; we should have called the kid’s parents before they ever left, or something—”
He broke off and sucked the pink water through his straw, making a rattling, blatting sound. His face was shuttered and his eyes were blank. I felt tears spring to my eyes and a lump form in my throat, and reached over and put my hand over his.
“I’m so awfully sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to pry. It must be…terrible.”
“Yes. It is.”
And then he looked up and smiled.
“I’ve got two other kids. A girl named Katie and a boy named Tom. After me. The T.C. is for Thomas Carlyle. Family names, both of them; the old man never read a book in his life. But it used to embarrass me at school, so I started using the initials. Tom’s starting to do it, too. Drives the whole family nuts. They’re good kids. I’ll be seeing them in the fall.”
“I gather they’re back home…where?”
“Greenville, Mississippi. Heart of the Delta. From your accent I’d say you were no stranger to that country.”
“No. Louisiana for me; Baton Rouge. I went to LSU, and then to Atlanta to work, and that’s where I’ve been ever since. I’ve never been out of the South except traveling. I knew you were from the Delta. There’s no other accent quite like it.”
“And no other place. Thank God. Yep, they’re in Greenville with their mama, and likely to stay there till they’re planted in the family plot. Tom’s starting the university at Oxford this fall, and Katie is knee-deep in cotillions and debuts and all that retro stuff we do so well on the Delta. They’re like their mother; they’re absolutely certain-sure of their place, their world. I’m glad for them. They won’t spend their lives wandering around looking for the place they’re meant to be. But I miss them. It’s all I do miss of that territory back there, those kids. I wish I could see them in my place, up there”—and he gestured toward the mountains—“but that’s not going to happen, I don’t think.”
“They don’t like it up there?”
“They don’t know it up there. Annabelle won’t let them come, and they can’t do it on their own until they’re eighteen. She thinks I deserted them for the West, and she doesn’t think the life of a hermit is a proper example. She’s probably right. God knows what they tell their friends I do. I see them back home when I see them. Of course, it’s not really me they see there, so I guess they’ll never really get to know me. But it’s better than nothing.”
“I don’t think I like this Annabelle,” I said.
“Me either, much, now,” he said. “But God, I was so crazy about her when I first met her that I practically went trotting around after her baying like a hound. She was a cheerleader at Ole Miss and I was a professional fraternity boy devoting myself to drinking and screwing and making just good enough grades to stay in school and keep on doing both. Not that you could screw Miss Annabelle Pritchard of Oak Grove Plantation. Her daddy would bite your ass off. So I married her about two hours after her graduation. It was a garden wedding at Oak Grove. I would have married her in a Buddhist ceremony to get in her pants. And I have to say, in those early years she was something. The perfect wife for a good old Delta boy living off his daddy while he decided what to do with himself. It was only when I started to change that she did. Or rather, didn’t. I realize now that I asked a literal impossibility of her, but then we shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. We just should have screwed till we got it out of our system. She was on the pill from the time she was sixteen, no matter what her daddy thinks.”
“You don’t like your family much.” It was not a question.
He laughed.
“Not worth shit. It’s entirely mutual.”
“Why?”
He raised the black eyebrows.
“For a proper Southern lady you sure do ask a lot of questions.”
“Oh, Lord, that was rude, wasn’t it? I don’t know what got into me. I’d absolutely never do that at home—”
“Precisely. You’re a different person out here. Like I am. Don’t apologize; it’s just what I hoped would happen to you. Well. My family. What to say about my family that Faulkner didn’t say better? My family has always had land and money and pale skin and blond hair and bluer blood than anybody else in the entire Delta, or so the conventional wisdom goes. And not a brain in the lot of them. My grandfather owned a bank in a little town near Greenville called Pennington, and by the time he died he all but owned the town, too. My father took over both in his time, and now my brother, Cleve, is running things. I was supposed to; I was the oldest son. But I hated that damned bank like poison ivy; there was no way anybody was going to get me into the bank or the life that went with it. And tell you the truth, I don’t think my father minded too much; here was this dour black cuckoo in that shiny isinglass family nest; it just wasn’t seemly. Old Cleve looked the part and wanted the bank worse than hell, so when I cut out Daddy just moved him right on in there. It was the right thing to do. Cleve is the best bank president in Pennington, Mississippi, which is to say the only one.”
“So what did you do? How did you get out here?”
“First I thought I wanted to be a newspaperman, so Daddy got me a job on the Greenville paper. He owned a chunk of that. I was a good writer; still am. Freelance writing is how I earn my living. But I hated the reporting part. I had to go interview the families of murder victims, of people who’d drowned in the river or gotten squashed on the highway, or of little kids who’d died of just plain being poor; black families who’d been tornadoed out of their shacks and trailer parks—I couldn’t do it. I quit after a year. Then I worked in the research library at Ole Miss. I liked that pretty much, but by that time the sense that I wasn’t in the right place was starting to eat at me. And things were starting to sour with Annabelle. I brought a couple of black coworkers home to dinner once or twice, and she just couldn’t make the jump. I didn’t like being told who I could have in my house and who I couldn’t, so I started staying away a lot.
“About that time I got offered a job in a big PR firm in Jackson, and she didn’t want to move, and I couldn’t stay around Greenville and Pennington anymore, with my whole family nipping at my heels like hounds at a coon.…I don’t know, I just picked up and moved to Jackson. I thought for a while I could come home on weekends and eventually persuade Annabelle to move, but you’d do better trying to get a penguin to move to the equator. She just couldn’t do it. All her…her self was tied up in the town and the house and her clubs and the kids and her mama and daddy, and mine, and the plantation—and none of mine was. Then I got sent to a convention in Berkeley, and came up to those mountains with a guy I met who was a great hiker, and we got up there into the redwood country, and something in the ground just ran up out of it and through the soles of my feet and up into me, and I knew that that was it; there it was. That was my place, and that would be where I found out who I really was. So I started coming back whenever I could, and after the divorce and my daughter…after that, I just went up there one time and stayed. By that time Daddy had died and left me enough money to live on for a long time if I’m careful. I think he always meant me to clear out of the Delta, because he left property and stock to Cleve and my sister and cash to me. I found a place in Palo Alto and got a job in the Stanford library, just filing and sorting at first, but I didn’t care; it wasn’t a career I wanted. And every weekend I went up into the Santa Cruz’s. And one weekend I found the fire tower and followed the trail down to the lodge, and old Caleb baby was there with a toots, and I knocked on the door and told him I’d look after his property in exchange for living in his fire tower. He asked me about money, and I thought he meant for me to pay rent, so I said I thought I could manage a little bit every month, and he laughed and said that what he’d meant was how much I wanted. I said I didn’t want any, just the tower, and I meant it; I didn’t want to be too beholden to him. So he said sure. I never did like him, but I came as close as I ever did then. And I’ve been here ever since.”
He paused and took a breath and said, “Also, I’m clumsy except on the dance floor; I can do a mean shag. And I’m cranky and bone-lazy and absentminded and I play a good blues guitar and have one of the best collections of blues tapes in the Western world, and I read constantly and unselectively and take in stray animals and play a little tennis every now and then but no golf, and I’m a terrific cook, and I am prone to have a snort more often than not. I have no significant other, but I do, as we say in the South, entertain friends once in a while. I am clean, disloyal, not at all brave, and trustworthy to a limited degree. You, for instance, could trust me with your life, but not many other Southerners can, or do. They’re right not to. I am not, as has been pointed out to me on many occasions by my family and in-laws, a responsible provider. There. Anything else you want to know you’ll have to ask me yourself.”
“Wow,” I said, grinning a little ruefully.
“Didn’t I tell you never to ask a hermit a question?”
“Do you really think of yourself like that? As a hermit?”
He frowned slightly, and the brown forehead furrowed under the flag of black hair that fell over it.
“I think of myself as someone who has to live like this,” he said slowly. “Or maybe it’s that I have to live up there. I’m not quite the same person even down here in town. I’m certainly not the same one back there in the Delta. And it’s that mountain person I need to be, not those others. So…I guess in a way I am a hermit. I don’t know what else you’d call it, and in any case it doesn’t matter.”
“I can sort of see what you mean,” I said. “About not being the same up there. There’s…something…isn’t there?”
“Yeah. I thought you’d see. You’re different up there, too. I’d bet the farm on that. Not the same person as you are back home. It doesn’t mean you’re better or worse, just different. Somebody else. You don’t need or want the same things as that other person.”
I did not reply. How could one person suddenly become two? I hated the thought, and said as much.
“God, how could you not be two people?” he said. “You can be fifty people, or a hundred, if you need to. Lots of people are, but they never know it. They try to bring the person they were in one place to another completely different one, and nothing fits, and they’re restless and unhappy, and likely to be that way all their lives. You’re lucky you felt the difference. You’re at least able to realize that there is one. Whether or not you can be who you need to be up here, is another matter. But I’ll tell you one thing: If you try to force the person you were back there to live up there in those woods for long, you’ll end up hating them and yourself, too. If I went back home I’d turn back into the person that was of that place, and nothing about it would work. Poor Annabelle, it was that person she married. But that person couldn’t stay in the Delta or in his own skin. Just could not. Up there, I’m finally me—but she hates this me. I can’t go back there and she couldn’t come out here with me. I’m making a real hash of this. I think I mean that you need to go with who you are wherever and whenever you find yourself. That’s what I mean by carpe diem. I think.”
“Carpe diem…”
“Yeah. Live like you need to wherever you are, every day. How could you be unhappy then?”
“How could you be with anybody else, living that way?” I said in real distress, wanting to understand.
He shrugged.
“Maybe you can’t. Maybe people like that aren’t meant to live with anybody else. It turned out that I couldn’t. Maybe I could with somebody who was…of my place. But so far, nobody else has been—”
“It sounds like Joseph Campbell,” I said. “You know, follow your bliss? I never really liked that idea. It seems so self-obsessed. But maybe it’s the only honest way to live—”
“Yeah, well, it’s why I don’t talk about this to people,” he said. “It does sound like New Age shit, and it’s as self-absorbed as hell.”
We were both silent for a while. I thought about what he had said. It would not fall into a neat pattern.
In a moment he said, in a different voice, “I’m glad it wasn’t you who’s Pringle’s lady. At first I thought it was.”
“Why on earth would you think that?” I said.
He stared at me.
“Are you kidding? You’re so pretty. You must know you are; I thought when I saw you, ‘Damn, it’s got to be her, and she’s such a classy woman, so much better than his usual ones.’ When your sister said it was her I almost cheered.”
I felt the hot color run up my neck and into my face.
“You must be kidding,” I said. “I wish you wouldn’t. I hate that kind of stuff—”
“I’m not kidding,” he said, and I saw that he was not.
“But…Lord, you saw Laura. I mean, she’s a movie star; she’s always been the beauty, a real one. People stop her on the street and in malls—”
“And here you are, a tall, skinny lady with freckles and a mop of curly hair like Brillo and a smile that could smelt ore. Who on earth would find you pretty? Beautiful? Only about a million people like me, Miz Merritt Fowler. Don’t sell yourself short. You are one terrific-looking woman, and, I think, a nice one, too. So what’s eating you? Your daughter? Your airhead little sister? You got troubles back home? Fighting with your husband, are you?”
“No,” I said coldly. “I am not. Why did you think I was?”
“Heard you on the phone.”
“I don’t remember saying anything that sounded even remotely like I was fighting with my husband. I did not even speak with my husband. That was his secretary—”
“Look, babe, I know the tone. It’s one thing I do know, the tone of a woman’s hurt and anger. I’ll shut up about it; it’s none of my business, of course. But I do know the tone.”
Abruptly the cold anger left me. I looked down at my hands. They were clasped whitely on my empty glass.
“It’s not a fight,” I said. “It’s more of a misunderstanding. They happen in all marriages. I’ll get things straightened out when I get home.”
“You’ll get,” T.C. said. “You’ll do. You’ll fix. Who does all those things for you?”
Incredibly, I began to cry. I sat in the waning sun and cried silently and for a while I could not stop. He wet a napkin in his water glass and mopped my face with it, and in a little while the ridiculous tears slowed and stopped, and I looked blearily up at him. He looked back mildly concerned, but mainly serene and focused and very interested.
“Tell me,” he said, and I did. I sat there, alternately sniffling and hiccuping and laughing, and I told him all of it. It seemed to take a very long time. I left out little, from my mother’s death up to the present, except that I did not mention the beautiful, selfless, saintly black UN doctor who was perhaps moving even now by Pom’s side through places where he and I once went as a unit. Somehow I could not manage that. To name it is to make it real, to make it yours.
When I finished, I said, “Well, that’s it. The world according to Merritt Fowler. I’m sorry I cried. Hearing it out loud, it all sounds pretty trivial. I’ve had a charmed life, really.”
He snorted. “Yeah, right. Just like I had. Listen, Merritt, don’t let all that stuff ruin this for you. This right now, that up there…it’s too good, too special to spoil. Leave that woman back home. Be here now; be all the way here. Let’s see who you turn out to be up there. Let me show you the woods.”
I was suddenly embarrassed and tentative. We had shown each other too much, talked too much. It was too soon.
“Show me the way to go home, instead,” I said lightly. “I’m asleep in this chair. If I don’t get out of here I’ll be comatose.”
He laughed and accepted the change of tone. He paid the check and we went back to the Jeep in the slanting light of late afternoon. We talked lightly, of light things. I was comfortable again, soothed. It had been, after all, I thought, a perfectly wonderful afternoon. On the way home we stopped for groceries. When we were back up in the mountains, just turning off onto Caleb’s road by the mailbox, I said, “Tell me about the earthquakes. I know they’re important to you, but I don’t know how they fit.”
He said nothing, and I looked over at him. His face was closed. He still did not speak, and I said, feeling myself redden again, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“No. I’m sorry. I was rude. You’re right; the earthquakes are important. I’ll tell you about them one of these days.”
But he did not speak of them anymore, and I was silent until we reached the fire tower. Some of the shine had gone off the dying day. I realized that I really was tired, terribly so. I wanted only to sleep. Only that.
“Come on up and I’ll see if there are any calls for you,” he said, parking the Jeep. “And I’ll feed you. You don’t want to eat alone on your first night on your own. I make a terrific pasta and mussel thing.”
“Really, T.C., I think I just want to go to bed,” I said, and blushed again, and he grinned. But he did not pick up on it.
“I can’t hold my eyes open,” I added hastily. “It’s been a fast three days.”
“The air up here does it to you,” he said. “Let me just run up and check the machine, and then I’ll drive you on down. Curtis, stay.”
He disappeared from the car and went past the tarp-covered shapes of his mysterious machinery, up the stairs of the tower. I laid my head back against the seat and thought nothing at all. Curtis, asleep on the backseat, groaned in a doggy dream and fell silent again. When T.C. got back into the Jeep I was dozing, too.
At the door of the lodge he stopped, a bag of my groceries in each arm. Twilight was falling fast down here on the ferny earth, but up in the tops of the redwoods day still rode, golden and glorious. The old silence was back.
“I’m sorry about the earthquakes,” he said. “I really was rude. I’m used to sort of guarding all that from people. But you’ll understand about them, I think. Let me take you on a tour of earthquake country tomorrow, and tell you about what I do up here and why I do it, and show you my toys. I haven’t really done that with anybody else. Caleb thinks I’ve got tinker toys or something up there.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
“Besides, you haven’t finished telling me about you. I want to hear the rest tomorrow.”
I smiled. “You know all there is to know about me now,” I said.
He looked at me for what felt like a long time. His face was attentive and serious; it was a considering look.
“No, I don’t,” he said softly. “I don’t know all about you. I don’t know nearly all about you.”
He shifted one bag into the crook of his left arm with the other one and with the right pulled me toward him and kissed me. He had to bend far down, even with my height. It felt, after Pom’s compactness, strange, exotic, like embracing another species. It was not a passionate kiss, but it was a long one, and soft, and seemed to search my mouth for some essence, find there some truth about me. I felt the long bones of my arms and legs turn to water, and the tears start again in my eyes. But it was not me who finally pulled away. Propped against my leg, Curtis groaned happily.
T.C. put my bags down on the door step and looked owlishly at me over the glasses, which had slipped down his nose.
“Put that in your pipe and smoke it, little lady,” he drawled. I watched him wordlessly as he shambled off up the trail, Curtis at his side. At the hairpin bend in the trail he suddenly leaped into the air and clopped his heels together. He looked like a puppet dangling loosely in midair. When he thumped back to earth he did not look back. Curtis barked and gave a desultory prance, and fell to following T.C. sedately again, as if he had never broken stride. Then they were gone around the bend.
I began to laugh helplessly. I took the groceries in, still laughing, and dumped them on the kitchen table, and went into my bedroom and simply fell full-length onto the bed. I did not remember my head hitting the pillow. Deep in the night we had a short fusillade of thunder and lightning, and a hard, straight rain, and it woke me enough to shuck off my clothes and crawl under the covers, and as I did, I began once more to laugh. When I awoke, many hours later, my mouth was as dry and stiff as if I had smiled all night in my sleep.