Legends of the Fall (14 page)

Actually two of Phillip's friends had asked for turkey sandwiches one morning thinking Nordstrom was the cook. They had been embarrassed later and one, a short plumpish Sephardic Jew from New York, had helped Nordstrom with dinner. He was an habitue of the same restaurant in the Village where Nordstrom had eaten with Sonia and Phillip. The young man was a fine cook and while they were preparing the food (filet of sole Bercy aux champignons) Nordstrom asked him about the waitress that had caught his eye. It proved to be a fatal question.

"Oh my god just stay away. She's an absolute kike cunt, a dancer with those big dark Monet eyes. She'd put you in the blender. I mean my god every well-heeled fool in town comes around with flowers and she treats them like dog-shit. She was married to this
schvartze
coke dealer, you know, a spade killer, and she had an affair with this writer who got his teeth beaten loose. But of course I'll introduce you if you love the masochism bit. You don't look like the type." The young man had given off a melancholy laugh. "I like these dipshit English girls myself."

The night of Sonia's anger Nordstrom capitulated and sat at the head of the table. He didn't mind that the people he cooked for smoked marijuana as it seemed to sharpen their appetites. He had roasted some quail he had stuffed with green grapes, halved and soaked overnight in Calvados. They were eaten greedily which pleased Nordstrom and he talked at length with two Harvard MBA's about the energy crisis and the consequences of Middle Eastern politics on oil imports. The two young men were surprised that the cook had been to Jidda, and had helped to negotiate an OPEC deal. They left rather hesitantly for a disco in Rockport with the rest of the crowd. Sonia kissed him and patted his back on the way out of the door.

Nordstrom watched their taillights recede into the warm darkness and then fed the tomcat that had emerged from under the backporch. If no one else were around the cat would now enter the kitchen which tonight was hot and muggy with a rank low tide smell hanging in the air, a seaboard reminder of what a swamp in summer smells like. The cat ate the last single quail that Nordstrom had been thinking about having for breakfast but had decided the cat would enjoy more than he did. The cat ripped at the brown-roasted skin and even crunched down the bones. Nordstrom petted the animal until it went rigid and dashed for the kitchen door. It was the plain girl with pear breasts in a pale-blue caftan. She shrugged at Nordstrom as he let the cat out the screen door. She poured a glass of club soda and drank as if her life depended on it. Nordstrom didn't remember her at dinner.

"I got this perfectly goddamned sunburn today and felt sick as shit." She talked out of the side of her mouth as was the strange habit of her class. Nordstrom could think of nothing to say so he put on his white cook's apron and began the dishes. He had taken off his shirt while the cat ate and felt a bit naked, now that the girl was there.

"Hope you're having a nice time," he said lamely.

"Sure. Faboo, if I hadn't fried the hell out of my skin like a perfect nitwit." She paused and boldly appraised Nordstrom. "You're a perfect dear to do all this cooking. I mean Sonia's so lucky." She sat down at the kitchen table and took a bag of papers from her purse and rolled a large joint, lit it and inhaled deeply. "I'm going to Santa Barbara tomorrow to visit my mother, if anyone gets up early enough to run to Logan." She approached Nordstrom at the sink and put the joint between his lips, ignoring his shaking head. "This is pretty good shit, supposedly Hawaiian."

"I'll take you to the airport," he choked expelling the smoke.

They looked at each other closely for a moment and there was a glimmer of comprehension Nordstrom decided not to admit to himself. He looked down at his hands buried in the soapy water. She left the room and put on a record, then returned and helped him with the dishes. Above the music they could hear a thunderstorm approaching from the west. The air grew even more still and warm. He felt the sweat flatten his hair and trickle down his back as he listened to her chatter about a career in fashion. She absentmindedly traced a finger down the sweat on his arm and he felt an involuntary shudder. Then she drew her caftan over her head and tossed it in the corner.

"I don't know about you but I'm perfectly suffocating and my burn itches."

She wore very slight, pale-beige panties and bra. She was burned, though not too badly, on the top of her breasts and just above and below her panty line. He reached out and touched a nipple beneath the fabric with a wet forefinger. She turned around and raised her arms. "My back isn't as bad." He wiped his hands on the apron and pressed them to the small of her back. Then she backed toward him, stumbling a bit in clogged sandals. He looked down at his hands and her buttocks craning outward. She reached behind her touching his hands, then slipped down her panties to just above her knees. "Go ahead. I've been thinking of this for an hour."

Nordstrom went ahead, as it were. On completion he collapsed backward to the floor with his pants around his ankles and the damp apron forming a small tent around his member. She laughed and he laughed. She lit him a cigarette and he smoked it without getting off the floor. She stepped out of her panties and took off her bra. She took a bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator and handed it to Nordstrom with a corkscrew. They abandoned the dishes and took a dip in the pool with the lights off, watching the approaching thunderstorm above the lights of Marblehead. They made love again with him sitting beneath her on a wicker lawn chair. The rain drove them indoors and they sat naked on the couch feeling the air cool gradually and watching the lightning and thunder explode above the ocean. They smoked another joint and danced. They fell asleep on the couch and did not hear the laughing voices that turned out the lights and record player.

Another week and the summer was over. Nordstrom made a melancholy bouillabaisse for twenty and the next day everyone disappeared. Another week in Boston and Sonia returned to Sarah Lawrence and Nordstrom returned to work. In the evening he was palpably lonely and began dancing alone to the records left behind and with the same bittersweet ache in his chest. In a little more than another month, in the middle of October, late one night he received a call from his mother that said "your father is dead."

Nordstrom took the first available plane out of Logan for O'Hare at dawn. He smiled remembering a previous dawn when he had taken the girl to the airport and had run into an old business associate from Los Angeles. He had been startled when the man had said "sorry about your divorce" and when Nordstrom had introduced the girl as one of his daughter's school chums it was plain that the man thought otherwise. But the meeting had made him feel buoyant driving against the traffic back to Marblehead; not only had he made love rather wonderfully, the word and idea of divorce no longer knotted his stomach or threw him into a fretful or melancholy state.

There was a five-hour wait at Milwaukee for a North Central for Rhinelander so he chartered an idle Lear Jet, having enjoyed the plane when he was in the oil business as the closest domestic approximation to the thrill of a jet fighter. The fact of his father's death had not penetrated much beyond his intellect and in a difficult, blustery landing he thought he might join him. The copilot had radioed ahead and his mother and a cousin, a sallow barber with a truly dirty mind, were waiting there to meet him. There were tearful embraces, then the barber could not help himself and quipped "it must be nice" as he eyed the Lear. Nordstrom said nothing. In previous visits when he had tried to conceal his success all of his old acquaintances had been terribly disappointed. Those who had stayed home didn't want Nordstrom to be one of them—he was the stuff of their economic fantasies and any gesture to the contrary wasn't appreciated. Walking to the car with his mother in a cold, light rain he remembered when his parents had come to Los Angeles for a visit. They considered Nordstrom's home to be somewhat of a "mansion" as they called it, and on the next to the last day his mother had shyly asked him to see where Cary Grant lived. He drove her over a few blocks and pointed out an imposing home, having no knowledge or interest in the movie colony. He liked movies and novels, but had no curiosity about celebrities, actors, actresses or writers. His father had always wanted him to be a forest ranger and that still seemed to Nordstrom a noble pursuit. When his father was in Los Angeles he fished off the piers or took a headboat out of Santa Monica. Then his father would eat a great quantity of fried sand dabs just short of serious indigestion and talk about his first visit to Los Angeles in 1930. He had come from a poor family of Norwegian immigrants living in Chicago and when the Depression hit he spent four years as a young hobo drifting all over the troubled country. After some brief civilities at the wake at his mother's house, jammed with friends and relatives, Nordstrom went to the funeral home and saw death itself. He stood at the open casket, the other visitors keeping distant to let the only son express his grief. He kissed his father's cool forehead and tears flushed out of him and his body shook. He was convulsed with loss and the unthinkable fact of death. He was a boy again and it was beyond his comprehension and he whispered "Daddy" over and over until there were no more tears left in his body and he walked out of the funeral home and down the street to the edge of town where he walked down past a lake rimmed with cottages to a log road that led into the forest. He walked up this log road for a mile or so until finally the sun came through the disappearing clouds and he took off his trench coat. Now it was suddenly Indian summer in the forest and the hardwoods were a brilliant deep yellow and red, shifting away in the haze to umbrous hills with splotches of white birch and green pine. He walked until his feet became sore and then he spread his trench coat on a stump and sat on it. He thought about his father, even felt envy for those Depression days when he had traversed the country to "look things over." Starting from nothing, everything was fine to his father beyond a subsistence level. He made money because he was competent, had wit and could not help making money. It was simply another world, Nordstrom thought. His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day. He seemed to see time shimmering and moving up above him and through the leaves and down around his feet and through his middle. Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else. There was no still point. For an instant he floated above himself and smiled at the immaculately tailored man sitting on the stump and in a sunny glade back in the forest. He got up and pressed against a poplar sapling swinging back and forth to a harmony he didn't understand. He looked around the clearing in recognition that he was lost but didn't mind because he knew he had never been found.

He walked toward the lowering sun knowing that in October it was toward the southwest. He came to a pond he didn't recognize and flushed a raft of blue-winged teal. He walked around the pond through a blackberry thicket, snagging his suit a number of times. He walked up a small creek muddying himself to his knees in a seep until he reached higher ground where he dropped his trench coat and climbed slowly up a large white pine tree to get a vantage point. His hands were blackened and sticky from the resin that exuded from the tree but he could see for a dozen miles: he could see the white steeple of the Lutheran church where his father's funeral service would be held in two days, he could see a motorboat crossing a lake, a silo without a barn—the barn had burned when he was a senior in high school. He curled his arm around a limb for safety and lit a cigarette, hearing the shotgun blast of a partridge hunter far in the distance. A crow flew by and was startled by his presence, squawking away at a greater speed to warn others. There's a man up in a tree in a blue suit. Nordstrom looked down at his suit and was amused at how he had ruined it. He took out his gold pocket watch and aimed the 9 at the steeple knowing there was a section of road near the 12 if he needed to climb another tree for a sighting. His father liked to climb trees and was always creating deliberately lame excuses for doing so. Up in the tree for the first time in twenty-five years, Nordstrom thought it was part of his father's penchant for "looking things over." When Sonia was a little girl and they came to Wisconsin for a summer vacation she had brought along a diving mask. His father didn't care much for swimming and hadn't noticed diving masks before but he took to puttering around the lake with Sonia and diving overboard in his favorite fishing spots. At dinner he would say he saw a bluegill "as big as a goddamned frying pan" or a pike or largemouth bass "as long as your goddamned arm."

Nordstrom finally emerged from the woods just before dark near a small Indian reservation community outside of town. He walked down a gravel road toward a tavern thinking how his father would be amused at his ruined four-hundred-dollar suit not to speak of his Florsheim shoes now scarred and mud-caked. The last mile or so he had been concentrating on suits and the government and decided he no longer much believed in either. Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits. He stopped in the parking lot of the tavern favored by Indians and regarded the dirty old jalopies and beaten pickups. Perhaps he should quit his job he thought, give all his money to his daughter and some to his mother whose small annuity was probably worthless in light of inflation. Then he cautioned himself for his wild thoughts, thinking that somehow they might be connected to death, to becoming lost and climbing a tree after a tiring flight and not having eaten all day. The bar smelled of piss and sweat and Nordstrom blinked to focus on the drinkers. He heard his name called out. It was Henry who was appreciably into a binge. Nordstrom stood next to him wondering whether he should embrace the old man whose head seemed to nod with the jukebox and booze.