“That’s nice. She’s being helpful.”
“You mean impossible. She says to me, see, honey, you don’t have to go anywhere, you can just read books about it.”
“True, your mother is always advising me to read more,” Hannah said. “She says you can live other lives through books, experience travel, love, sorrow.”
“She’s buying me books so I can see Barcelona from the comfort of my recliner while she makes me éclairs and rum babas.”
“Yeah,” said Hannah. “You have it so tough.”
Chloe drove. She didn’t want to say how much she envied Hannah her parents’ spectacular non-participation. Divorce did that—shifted priorities.
“They make unreasonable demands on me,” Chloe said.
Hannah turned down Nirvana. “I wish somebody would make a demand on me.”
Grandpa is making demands on you, Chloe wanted to say. How’s that going? “I thought you liked that they never asked you for things,” she said instead.
“Turns out, I want to be asked for something.”
“Like what?”
“Anything,” Hannah said. “Just to be asked.” She turned to Chloe. “Why are you so tense? Look at the way your hands are clutching the wheel.”
Chloe tried to relax, really she did.
“I’m the one who should be tense,” said Hannah. “You have no idea how upset he’s going to get.”
Chloe thought long and hard about her next question. “He’s generally in good health, right?” she asked. Like his heart?
“Oh, yes,” Hannah said. “Believe me, there’s nothing wrong with him.”
“Ew, gross. Not what I meant. But okay.”
“What’d you mean?”
“Nothing.”
Hannah was looking too pretty for someone who was about to break up with a nonagenarian. Almost seemed mean. The poor fellow was going to be feeling like shit anyway, why rub it in his face, the youth, the slim feminine attractiveness, the long legs? Hannah even wore a skirt, as if headed to church. Linen skirt as short as the month of February. Navy blue sparkly ballet flats. A cream top. Face deceptively “unmade-up,” yet fully made-up. Eyes moist.
Chloe couldn’t pay too much attention to Hannah’s appealing exterior while driving down a zigzaggy two lane country road, but from a surreptitious corner of her eye, Hannah was looking delectable, not forlorn.
“Hannah, why are you looking so pretty if you’re ending it with him?”
She beamed. “He likes to look at me, that’s all.”
“But you want him to like to look at you less, don’t you?”
Hannah didn’t reply, busy eating her fingers, twisting her knuckles.
To everything there is a season. That was another one of her mother’s mottos. This was emphatically not the season for college confessions. This was a time for lovers. Chloe cleared her throat.
“Can I ask you about Blake?”
“What about him?”
“Don’t you like him?”
“I love him, what are you talking about?”
“Well, then, why …”
Hannah waved at her. “You won’t understand, Chloe. You and Mason are so perfectly aligned.”
“You think so?” Chloe wouldn’t have minded talking about it.
“But it’s different with me and Blake. He’s so sweet, but …” Hannah paused, chewed her nails, stared out at the pines passing by. “Besides the physical, we have little in common. Don’t get me wrong. The physical gets you pretty far. With Blake, believe me, almost the whole way. If it was the only important thing, we’d be in great shape. But aside from that, what do we have? All the things I like, he couldn’t care less about, and all the things he likes I don’t get at all.”
“Blake’s so into you. He likes everything you’re into.”
“What do I care about junk hauling, or building things, or helping old people, or fixing band saws? Or fishing? And what does he care about Paris and museums, and classic literature, and pretty clothes?”
“There are other things …”
“Yes, we’ve done them.” Hannah sighed dramatically. “Do you think that boy will ever live away from his dad? He still helps him into the boat, for God’s sake. He wants to start a junk business. I mean, what am I going to do with someone like that?”
“He also wants to write a book,” said Chloe.
Hannah waved in dismissal. “He and a million others. Me, I want to travel the world. I want to learn three languages. I want to live in a big city. You and I both do. It can’t end with Blake any other way but this way.”
“But that’s the thing,” Chloe said, her gaze on the road. “It’s not ending. If you ended it with him, that’d be one thing. But you’re not.”
Hannah turned to Chloe, frowning disdain on her displeased face. “How do I do that? And then what? What do I do with us?” She made a large air circle, embodying by the broad sweep not just herself and Blake, but Chloe and Mason too. “We are all four of us together every day. We have one life. If I break up with him, what happens to the four of us? Do you even think before you speak? I mean, could you break up with Mason?”
“I don’t want to.”
“But if you did?”
They didn’t talk for a while. The road was narrow, the pines tall, the ride long, what was there to say? Except what a hypocrite Chloe was, what a deceiver. She decided she would tell Hannah about San Diego on the way home, her heart falling through her abdomen at the thought of it.
Chloe underestimated the open and public heartbreak a man near retirement age could display on the walkways of Orono, near the river on the University of Maine campus, when his eighteen-year-old lover told him it had to end.
Chloe stayed as far back as possible. She couldn’t believe Hannah would do this on the avenue where students and faculty strolled on a warm May evening. But his reaction was so extreme that perhaps this was why Hannah had chosen the public square for his flogging; she had hoped he would keep it together. At first they walked arm in arm, overlooking the flowing waters, the mountains beyond. He smiled at her, squeezed her arm. They made quite a picturesque couple against the backdrop of the snow-capped Appalachians.
Hannah spoke. He stopped walking. He took his arm away. She gestured, in her small elegant way, and he stood, a pillar of incomprehension. Then he started to weep. Hannah stroked him, embraced him, talked and talked, a filibuster of consolation. Nothing helped the gray man become less stooped.
Chloe had to stop peeking at his despair. It was as if she had caught him in the shower, or them in a different sort of clinch. She became embarrassed, for herself, for him, for the passersby who slowed down, concerned at his distraught exhortations. He grabbed his chest, as if in the middle of heart failure.
After an hour he was still crying! And Hannah was still rubbing him, talking to him, gesturing far and wide.
Chloe understood nothing of this kind of emotion. Nothing. It seemed to her that logic must prevail in a grown man’s head when he spied himself standing in the middle of the college where he had tenure, bawling because his teenage lover had decided to move on. Not even move on, for Blake was the here and now, just … move sideways. Move back. Move away. How could the enormous common sense of that decision finally—finally!—not triumph over him?
Chloe had been keeping an eye on the time—the thing she usually had least of, next to money—but after ninety minutes her eyes left the watch permanently to pitch silent poison darts in Hannah’s direction, hoping her friend would sense Chloe’s own despair at the tedium of spying on a stranger’s excessive distress. Come on, wrap the whole thing up, put it in a doggy bag, take it home. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! Chloe kept silently shouting. LET’S GO!
There was pacing, but there was no departing.
A hundred and ten minutes. A movie now. First a tragedy, then a comedy, then a farce, now Shoah.
Wait. Something new was happening. The stooped old man nodded. He let Hannah hug him, pat him
.
Unfounded optimism. There he was, crying again. He could barely stand on his grieving geriatric legs. Carefully Hannah helped him over to a bench, and sat down next to her soon-to-beerstwhile lover, continuing to cajole and comfort him.
The girls had a three-hour ride back home.
“Did you see him?” Hannah asked.
Oh, I saw him all right. Saw him, heard him, memorized him. I could play him by heart on the piano, that’s how well I’ve studied him.
“Yes,” said Chloe.
How could she tell Hannah about college?
She couldn’t. And didn’t.
She wanted to ask if Hannah loved Blake half as much. Would she shed a quarter of Martyn’s tears when it came time to say goodbye to Blake? Would she miss him an eighth as deeply? What was it called when it wasn’t pain, but a fraction of pain? Grimly Chloe closed her hands on the wheel.
“What happens next, Chloe?”
“I don’t know, Hannah. What happens next?”
It was going to get dark soon. Her mother would be worried. Nothing to do but drive on. “Remember Darlene Duranceau?”
“Who could ever forget her? Why would you bring her up, of all people?”
Chloe shrugged. “I’m trying to make a point about what happens next.”
Blake and Mason had dismantled the woman’s overflowing garbage heap of house in Denmark, Maine, after she died. She had been a hoarder, hoarding even herself in the end. She kept eating and sitting, eating and sitting, and soon she got so big that she couldn’t move off her couch, and she just kept eating and eating and eating, using the couch not just as a bed and a dining table, but also as a toilet, and, eventually, as a grave.
It was winter when she died, and everyone had been snowed in for days. The local market couldn’t deliver Darlene’s groceries. When the roads were finally plowed, Barry the delivery boy brought Darlene her customary two boxes of Pringles and pretzels. Barry found her. Barry did not recover from this. He had been a shy clumsy kid in Chloe’s homeroom, but now he was on major meds, in therapy six days a week and home-schooled by Social Services.
The townies talked about nothing else. What was Darlene’s life like before she and the couch became one? What drama in her life had led her to the upholstered end? Was the end a consequence, an answer to a why? Or was it a catalyst? If everything you did led to everything else that would eventually happen, the question was: was Darlene Duranceau the beginning or the end?
After the coroner pronounced her dead, and it was time to remove her from the premises, the EMT workers discovered that she was stuck. From lack of movement, she had developed sores that festered, causing open wounds that oozed into the sofa, which then closed up around Darlene’s flesh like lichen to a rock. She had liquefied and then mummified into her furniture. The town cremated her with the couch. No one but the boys out in the schoolyard ever discussed how the funeral home fit Darlene and her Davenport into the relatively narrow opening of the cremation pyre.
How could Chloe add to Hannah’s chaos by confessing about California?
She wants to tell her, but she can’t.
She can’t.
And she doesn’t want to.
Hannah will feel betrayed.
What kind of a terrible friend would Chloe be to betray her friend and then tell her about it?
So she doesn’t tell her.
She thinks she justifies it beautifully.
Only a guilty mouthful of what feels like open safety pins alerts Chloe to the falseness of her excuses.
“I know the answer,” Hannah said. “You know what happened next for Darlene? Nothing.”
“Yes. That was the end of Darlene’s story. But yours is just beginning, Hannah. That’s what I’m trying to say. Take heart.”
“Did you see how upset Martyn was?”
“I saw.”
“Do you think he’s going to be okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think is going to happen?”
“It’ll be something. Martyn is not Darlene.”
“But what if what happens next is you and your sacred striped sofa become one?” said Hannah. “What if when God said flesh of my flesh, he meant flesh of my sofa? The Chesterfield of my flesh? What if Martyn is a Darlene?”
“You can’t possibly believe that.”
There was silence for a while. It was black out. There were no lights on the road except for the car’s headlights.
“Blake is the sweetest lover,” Hannah said in a small sad voice. “You don’t expect that from someone like him, because he’s so rough and tumble, but he is super gentle and super considerate. He’s always caressing me, kissing my back. He’s always trying to make me happy.”
“You’re lucky,” Chloe said, settling into the wheel, stepping on the gas pedal. She didn’t think Blake was so rough. For months, when his dad couldn’t walk, on account of nearly dying, oh and having a back broken in three places, Blake carried his father to the reclining chair by the sandy shore and set him down into it so Burt could watch the lake and the sky and Blake and Chloe fishing in the boat and skating on the ice. His dad liked to watch the kids having fun, Blake said.
9
Red Vineyard
“TEACH ME, HAIKU. TELL ME HOW TO BEGIN. TUTOR ME IN beginnings.”
Blake plopped down across from her in the nearly empty learning center, scruffy, smiling, slapping his notebooks onto the heavy wooden table between them. His pens rolled toward the window. Chloe watched them, and he watched her watching them. Without breaking eye contact with her, he stopped them from falling to the floor and then he spoke. “What’s been the matter with you today?” When she didn’t reply, he went on. “Is it because of Barcelona? Don’t worry. They’ll say yes. They’ve been talking to my mom. Asking her if she thinks we’re trustworthy.” Blake laughed. “I told her, lie, Ma, say yes!”
She smiled half-heartedly but couldn’t look at him. She pretended she was super distracted by Very Important Thoughts. About pi and Ovid and Pearl Buck. The tutoring center at the Academy was a large first-floor classroom with twenty-foot windows and long wooden tables behind which girls like herself sat and waited for students who needed help in math, hard sciences, English, you name it.
Although final exams were getting close, the place was nearly empty. She’d had just one student all afternoon, an apathetic freshman from Delaware named Kerwin, whom she schooled in irrational numbers like pi. “You can’t have an infinite string of zeroes in a pi exponent,” Chloe told Kerwin, “because then the fraction would end. And what do we know about pi? It’s transcendental. It cannot end.” Her mother had once taught her about pi. Something about divinity and infinity. The soul is divine, her mother had told an anguished Chloe. Don’t worry. The soul has no end. Like pi. An infinite thing cannot end.
Kerwin wasn’t getting it. And Chloe wasn’t at her best. Her mind kept wandering. To distant beaches, imposing cathedrals, white stucco resorts in the hills, Hannah walking arm in arm with Blake through the halls, cozy as all that, as if Martyn had not happened, as if the last eight months of tawdry Tuesdays and Saturdays at the Silver Pines had not happened, Hannah making out with Blake between Health and Gym, discussing the prom with him between English and Science, fretting about her mango dress matching his peach cummerbund at the prom, and all the while Blake going on and on about Barcelona, and all the while sadness seeping on and on into Chloe’s heart. How could Hannah pull off such nonchalance? Chloe couldn’t tell why this bothered her as it did. Usually she tried not to ask herself too many why questions.
Now, pretending she hadn’t heard Blake ask about beginnings, Chloe turned to the window, to continue to daydream about Iberian dragons rampaging through the streets. Across the field she could almost make out Mason’s breathless shape on the baseball diamond. He was just a panting dot in golden dirt. It was the only time she saw him panting, perspiring, on fire. When he was out in the field.
“Yoo-hoo, Haiku …”
She blinked and dragging herself back to reality turned to a quizzical, smiling Blake. He was clad as usual in plaid and flannel and cotton and denim, his stubble four days old, his wild hair three days unbrushed and two months streaked by the spring sun. “I just need to know what’s in my suitcase,” he said.
“In our play we reveal what kind of people we are,” Chloe told Blake, quoting Ovid. “So first figure that part out.”
He looked wholly unimpressed. “You’re putting the cart before the horse.”
“No …”
“You are. Believe me. First I write. Then I figure out what it all means. Which, by the way, is the opposite of the insane horse crowd. They put portents on paper first and then use a mallet to beat it into a story.”
“You have it all figured out, don’t you? What do you need me for?” She sounded just like her father.
He leaned forward as if confiding. “I don’t have anything figured out. What would you put inside it? How would you start it? Look what I have.” He pulled out a three-subject spiral notebook to show her. He had divided his notes into sections: story, characters and the last one for thoughts, notes, lists, tidbits.
“I write and write,” he said, “but I still don’t know the most important thing.”
Ain’t that the truth, thought Chloe. She studied the grain in the table. He was too carefree and earnest to be saddled with her pity. “You do kinda have to know what’s in the suitcase if you’re writing a mystery.”
“Who said it’s a mystery?” He shook his head. “No. See, it’s the best thing of all. It’s an unexpected thing. You think you’re reading one kind of story, and then—POP, it’s another.”
“Like not a mystery?”
“You think it’s a mystery, but it’s really a Western.” He laughed. “Or you’re ready for a mother–daughter drama, but it’s really a two-man play about the meaning of trees. A thriller becomes a musical, a coming of age story is now the return of the native, science fiction turns out to be a war story.”