Crossers (6 page)

The house was on the market only a week before it sold, for twice what he’d paid for it. After he peddled his furniture at an estate sale, Anne insisted he stay with her and her husband in Redding. He then consulted with his lawyer on how best to dispose of his financial assets, which with the proceeds from the house now totaled in the low eight figures. He was surprised, and somewhat embarrassed, by how hard it was to get rid of even a minor fortune, portioning his out to various charities and conservation groups, to a scholarship fund for minority students at his prep school, Hotchkiss, and to a trust for his daughters and any future grandchildren. Combined with his generous retirement package, what remained was considerably more than enough to sustain him in style if he lived to be a hundred, which he fervently hoped he would not.

His sister held a valedictory Christmas dinner for the whole family. Morgan and Justine came in from the city and stayed the night. They cried when he left the next morning. With all his belongings fitting easily into the cargo compartment of his Suburban and with his dog for company, he saw himself as a refugee of the strange new war that had begun on a temperate September morning. Were it not for his girls, he would have felt deracinated, jobless, wifeless, parentless (his father had died of esophageal cancer at sixty-seven; his mother had fallen to a stroke three years ago).

There was no rush, and he made the trip in easy stages, watching the landscapes change from hills to plains to desert to mountains and back to desert. He caught the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square on a motel-room TV in New Mexico, spent New Year’s Day driving through eastern Arizona, and at last, a week after starting out, arrived at the San Ignacio.

H
IS HOUSE IN
N
EW
C
ANAAN
had had twelve rooms, his new dwelling two, heated by a wood-burning stove. It was off the grid, electricity supplied by a generator, and was sheltered in a grove of Emory oaks backed by a ridge and sided by two low hills. The front porch, supported by varnished pine posts, looked out upon the grasslands and tree-speckled canyons of the San Rafael Valley, rolling away to the Patagonia Mountains and the San Antonios in Mexico, a view most people would have described as “breathtaking” or “inspirational.” Castle did not find it so. Although he wasn’t blind to the beauty of his surroundings and was grateful that there was nothing in them to prompt the wrong memories, he hadn’t come out for inspiration and breathtaking vistas, nor with any illusions that living close to nature in the great American West would release him from his despotic grief and the fear it sometimes permitted to share its reign. An easing of his bondage, not an ending, was all he expected of his solitary life in the sequestered adobe. It was a kind of halfway house between the iron lockdown he’d known and the liberation he’d sought with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

2

S
OMETHING WAS OUTSIDE
. Something she’d heard or smelled on the cold drafts sneaking through the cracks in the window frames roused Samantha from her sleep and drew her to the door. Castle caught her movement out of the corner of his eye as he sat reading—the movement not of the dog herself but of her shadow, passing along the wall on the opposite side of the room. He laid the book on his lap and looked at her as she faced the door, so alert and motionless that she and her silhouette resembled two dogs on point. A low growl deep within her chest made her sound more menacing than she was.

“Just a coyote, maybe javelina,” Castle said. “Lie down, Sam.”

The dog responded neither to the reassurance nor to the command, rumbling at whatever had disturbed her, coyote or javelina, maybe something more dangerous, like a bear or mountain lion. Then she started barking, which she did only when a two-legged stranger approached the house. Castle went to the door and called, “Who’s there? Anyone there?” He hadn’t heard a car drive up. Someone on foot, and out here on a frigid January night could only be a
mojado
—a wetback, a gross misnomer in a land where the rivers ran dry ten months of the year—or a
burrero
, as the drug runners were called. Blaine and Monica had warned him that the valley was a highway for contraband people and narcotics. He waited for whoever or whatever was out there to pass on, but as Sam kept barking, he threw on his coat, got a spotlight, and to stop the dog from bolting outside, opened the door just enough to allow himself through. No wind and no moon, and the brighter stars—Sirius, Rigel, Aldebaran—looked close enough to touch. His breath plumed in the cold. It surprised him, how cold winter nights could be on the high desert, as cold as the New England he’d left barely more than two weeks ago. He swept the light over his car and the rock-walled shed that housed the well-pump and generator, pointed it into the pool of solid blackness made by the clustering oaks. Seeing nothing, he circled around and shined the lantern at the ridge behind the house. The beam caught a fleeting patch of white, and a moment later he heard branches cracking as a large animal moved through the trees. It must have been a deer flagging its tail in flight. He stood listening for a few seconds. The silence was total, the sort of silence he imagined prevailed on some dead planet.

Inside, her alarm over, Sam had returned to her fleece bed beside the stove. She raised her eyes to him as he hung his coat on a wall peg near the door.

“Since when? Since when did you start barking at deer?”

Castle pulled another log from the firewood tub and tossed it into the stove, then settled back into his chair to resume reading. Seneca’s
Ad Marciam de consolatione
. The Loeb Classical Library edition, in the red covers, with the Latin text facing the English translation. He’d sent away for these books so he could read Seneca in the original in an attempt to reacquaint himself with the Latin he’d studied at Hotchkiss but had long since forgotten. The mental discipline of translating was good for him, stopped him from thinking on his bad nights. Tonight was that kind of night.

No, there was nothing out here to bid memories, but they came anyway, striking without warning. Earlier he’d been grilling the quail he’d shot that day on an old stone barbecue pit he’d repaired with the help of Gerardo Murrieta, the ranch’s full-time cowboy. He’d hunted with Sam two hours in the morning, another two in the afternoon, and came home with five birds in his game vest. He got a mesquite fire going, and while the wood burned down to coals, he cleaned and plucked the quail and stuffed sage into their cavities and brushed the skin with a mixture of garlic and olive oil before placing them on the grill. As he drew in the scent of sizzling meat, his eye reached out to the tin roofs and the windmill of ranch headquarters, on a flat below him, and beyond to the bare cottonwoods fringing the Santa Cruz River, and then across the breadth of the San Rafael, the pale winter grass almost white in the dusk and speckled by the red and black hides of grazing cattle.

As he was turning the birds, Amanda stepped out of the shower and embraced him from behind and nibbled the back of his head and neck and both shoulders. There, by the smoking grill in the desert twilight, Castle could hear her husky voice and feel her wet lips on his skin. Of all his memories, this was the most frequent and the most vivid, too vivid to be called a memory; a reexperiencing, rather, and it brought on the same cold grating in his lungs, like breathing ground glass, that he’d felt so often before. “Oh, Christ, Mandy, Mandy,” he cried aloud, his eyes flooding. He turned away from his task, unable to go on with it, and did not shed tears so much as heave them in violent spasms. By the time he recovered, the quail were charred to a crisp. He fed them to his dog.

Quam in omni vita servasti morum prohibitatem ver cundiam … Quam in omni vita servasti morum prohibitatem ver cundiam, in hac quoque at praestabis; est enim in quaedam at dolandi modestia
. Trying to unravel that sentence practically tore the ligaments in his brain. He reached into the magazine rack for his Latin textbook, an artifact from his prep school days, but it was of no help. In defeat, he turned to the English translation on the opposite page.
That correctness of character which you have maintained all your life, you will exhibit in this matter also; for there is such a thing as moderation even in grieving
.

Marcia, the recipient of Seneca’s essay, had lost a beloved son in his youth, and Castle wondered how she’d reacted to such bleak consolation. There is such a thing as moderation even in grieving? (Much as he admired Seneca, he often argued with him across the gulf of two thousand years.) I don’t think so, except when the loss isn’t much—your old aunt Tillie, say. But when the loss is grave, and the pain scalds your nerves until they’re numb, leaving only an emptiness as if all your organs have been sucked out and your skin and bones become a vessel for a vacuum, well, how do you moderate that, Lucius Annaeus Seneca?

He read on, following the translation.
So many funerals pass our doors, yet we never think of death … Who of us ever ventured to think upon exile, upon want, upon grief?
He underlined those phrases, and then these:
That man lost his children; you also may lose yours … Such is the delusion that deceives and weakens us while we suffer misfortunes which we never foresaw that we ourselves could possibly suffer. He robs present ills of
their power who has perceived their coming beforehand
. Starting another argument, Castle scribbled in the margin, “True, but so many things can’t be foreseen.” Like fanatics hijacking airliners and turning them into guided missiles, he thought. But with Seneca’s larger point he agreed, at least insofar as it applied to himself. He hadn’t foreseen any evil befalling him for the simple reason that none ever had.

A fortunate son all right, raised in Tokeneke, where shaded private roads wound past the mansions of board chairmen and Wall Street lawyers and investment bankers. It was the toniest neighborhood in Darien, tony enough in its own right, a Wasp preserve when he was growing up, not a synagogue within the town limits, just one Catholic church—a mere chapel compared with St. Luke’s Episcopalian—and the only blacks to be seen were those who cleaned the houses or bused tables at the Tokeneke Club. His father was a cardiologist whose patients included many of those same chairmen, lawyers, and investment bankers, along with a few prominent New York and Connecticut politicians. The doctor had also inherited a respectable portfolio from Castle’s grandfather, a social-climbing contractor who’d Americanized his surname (his father, one Giuliano Castelli, had emigrated from Italy in the 1880s), married a New England Brahmin, and had the moxie to say yes when a friend named Thomas Watson asked if he would invest in Watson’s new company, International Business Machines.

Castle’s mother, Grace, who liked to joke that she was “an Arizona cowgirl what done right good for herself” in marrying a doctor from a moneyed eastern family, finished her education after the war, and began teaching English at a private school in Stamford. She was active in the kinds of charities that drew women of her status, but she always made time for Gil and his sister, helping them with their homework, taking them to tennis lessons, riding lessons, sailing lessons. She tended to dote on him, creating in Anne a resentment that persisted into adulthood. Other than that, theirs was a happy family, and since, as Tolstoy famously remarked, all happy families are alike, there was nothing more to be said about it.

Castle’s future was assured from birth. All he had to do was walk into it, and he did, proceeding from Darien Country Day to Hotchkiss to Princeton to the Wharton School, spared from Vietnam by student deferments and from the excesses of the sixties by a moderateness inherent in his nature. After Wharton he learned his craft at a small brokerage house, then was hired by HarrimanCutler, fourth-largest investment firm on the planet. He became a star in the retail division, rising to senior vice president and senior consultant, then was elected to the Executive Club, reserved for the firm’s top producers. At fifty, he knew he’d gone as high as he could go. Whatever it took to summit in the ranges of pure capitalism—an overweening greed, a driving ambition born of some deep insecurity—was missing in Gillespie Castle. And that was all right. He was very well off, insulated from all financial shocks short of a nine-plus on the economic Richter scale.

Misfortune has a way of choosing some unprecedented means or other of impressing its power on those who might be said to have forgotten it
. Forgotten it? he asked himself with some bitterness. He’d scarcely known it. His father’s death at a relatively early age and his mother’s a decade later had been blows but didn’t qualify as tragedies. Otherwise he could think of only one misfortune that had clouded his clement existence before September 11, 2001: his divorce from his first wife. It was not the garden-variety suburban breakup—Eileen had left him for another woman—and there had been some savage arguments over child custody early in the proceedings. Castle, as conventional as he was temperate, objected to their daughters growing up in a Sapphic household and petitioned for primary custody. Eileen argued that her sexual orientation had no bearing on her rights as a mother. They battled for months through their lawyers but reached a settlement eventually, with as little bloodshed as could be hoped for. The judge, Solomon-like, split the difference, formulating a complicated arrangement by which Morgan and Justine would spend exactly 182 days a year with their father and 183 with their mother and same-sex stepparent.

Some two years later, through mutual friends, he met Amanda Farmington. In one more year they were married in Boston, the reception held at her parents’ yacht club in Hingham.

In his drafty cloister on the Arizona desert, he heard once again the dance music drifting over the harbor, the clang of bell buoys, the quarrelsome cries of seagulls coming to him from across a continent, from out of the unrecoverable past.
No pain so great as the memory of joy in present sorrow
. He was crying again, though not as he had earlier in the day—a kind of seepage from his eyes. He pondered the only original idea he’d heard Ms. Hartley express: that his remembered joys tormented him because he was exaggerating them, transforming his marriage into a perfect idyll, much as a refugee transforms his lost homeland into an Eden that never existed. He considered that proposition in the hopes of finding in it some truth to dull the hurt; but he concluded that he was not the victim of a delusion. Yes, he and Amanda had quarreled over one thing or another—she had a short fuse, her eruptions of temper startling by their contrast with her usual composure. But he could not recall a moment when he’d regretted marrying her, nor a moment when he’d felt even a passing attraction to someone else. On the mornings when he woke before she did, he would turn over and look at her serene face and think how lucky he was. His one mistake had been to believe his luck would last.

He went to the kitchen and poured himself a scotch, measuring its depth with three fingers laid against the glass. Then he returned to his chair and his Seneca, and fell asleep, the book open on his lap. Sam, licking his arm, woke him at two
A.M.
He got into his long underwear and went to bed.

R
ISING AT SEVEN
, he put on fur-lined slippers and a wool robe and hopped down the path to the shed and turned on the generator. A heavy frost lay on the grass, and the whole valley glittered in the morning sunlight. The outside thermometer read twenty-two degrees. It was no more than fifty inside, the fire having died during the night. He built a new one, then stood rubbing his hands over the cast-iron stove. His father, a passionate outdoorsman and an admirer of Teddy Roosevelt, would have approved of these rigors. Like TR, Dr. Castle feared that privilege bred pansies and took his son on hunting, fishing, and camping expeditions in the Adirondacks from an early age. He’d also signed him up, in the summer of Gil’s fourteenth year, for boxing lessons at an inner-city gym in Bridgeport. From June to August, Castle banged the heavy bag and the speed bag and sparred with black and Hispanic boys, who taught him what it was like to get hit and to bleed. He was an athletic kid with quick reflexes, but he proved to be an indifferent fighter, mostly because he was reluctant to hit back. He was more adept with a rod and gun. By the time he finished Hotchkiss, he could cast a fly sixty feet to a rising trout and was outshooting his father and his cronies on the skeet range at the venerable Campfire Club in Chappaqua. On a Christmas vacation, at a hunting camp in upstate New York, he bagged his first deer, a six-point buck. One shot at a hundred yards.

His hands warmed, Castle put coffee on the propane range. While it brewed, he fetched his boots and brush pants from the bedroom and got dressed in front of the stove, now throwing off waves of heat. The coffeepot, a vintage percolator with fire-blackened enameled sides, filled the room with its aroma. He poured a mug full and sat at the table, reflecting on the peculiarity of his ending up here, in the cabin his great-uncle built when Arizona was still a territory. Had he come to dwell in a place like this involuntarily, he would have been seen as a man who’d fallen from a pinnacle of success, the victim of a financial collapse, of alcoholism or drug addiction. But he’d chosen to live here, and he liked the bare-bones simplicity of it. The main room was maybe twelve by eighteen feet, the kitchen at one end, the sitting area at the other, furnished with a couple of old armchairs over which ratty cowhides had been draped. The bedroom was just large enough to accommodate a double bed, a small dresser, and an ancient Mexican armoire, the several colors it had worn over the years showing through the chips in its present coat of aquamarine. The bathroom, added on when indoor plumbing came to the ranch, was no bigger than a closet and equipped with fixtures—a rust-streaked pedestal sink, a metal shower stall, a toilet with a wooden seat and flush tank—that belonged in a museum.