The Driftless Area (6 page)

“You should get out more,” said Pierre.

“Mmm. I know it.”

“I just read a book. I could bring it to you.”

“Is it interesting?”

“Yeah, but sort of confusing.”

“I don’t mind that.”

“The idea of the book is that time doesn’t exist. And everything that ever happened or ever will was here from the start. And even, I think, different versions of what will seem to happen. Or, not here, but somewhere. That’s the confusing part. As to where it is exactly. But all at once.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I might if I could understand it,” said Pierre. “But even while I was reading it, I would turn the page and think, Well, what is that?”

“If not the passage of time.”

“Right.”

“Yes, bring that, and I’ll give it a read.”

Pierre opened his eyes. The colors of the grass and sky seemed to vibrate. He propped himself up on one elbow and turned toward her.

“Stella.”

“Yes, Pierre.”

“Would you like to go somewhere with me sometime?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I need to be here. But you can come back whenever you want.”

Then she got up and went into the yellow house and came out carrying the ice skates.

“What did you do to them?”

“Treated the leather, scoured the blades.”

“Thank you,” said Pierre. “This is something else I owe you for.”

“You’d better learn to ride that horse.”

Stella lay out a while longer under the sun and then went into the house and put the white robe on and took a string of lights from a cupboard in the kitchen. She arranged them around the bonsai tree on the table and plugged them into the wall with an extension cord. They were small decorative lights in the shape of acorns, with cloth leaves and wire vines attached to the cord between the lights. Some of the lights were shaded light green and others bronze. There was nothing special about them, but she had found them in this house and they helped her to think.

She sat at the table looking at the lights. Sharp at first, they began to blur and pulse as she watched. Her hands lay flat on the table and her breathing slowed and made no sound. She raised her head and closed her eyes but the lights remained in her vision, dimming slowly to darkness. And after a while a series of images began to play in her mind. Some of them she’d seen before, some not. And they always began the same way.

A gloved fist breaks a window

An armchair begins to burn

Walls blister, shatter, and fall

The bed rises, an island in a lake of fire

Now Stella’s breath became rapid and broken, and her eyes darted back and forth beneath closed lids.

The Driftless Area at night, ridged and green like the folds of a blanket

Pierre skates on the lake

A child’s hand draws in blue crayon on a paper plate

A round stone flies through the air

Pierre sits sleeping in the forest, a gun across his legs

She opened her eyes, and wiped her face with the lapel of the robe, and put her hand over her hammering heart.

Carrie Miles sat down at the Jack of Diamonds and dropped her keys on the wood.

“Hey, bartender,” she said. “How about a Phillips Screwdriver.”

“Well, all right, then,” said Pierre.

He made her the drink and gave it to her with a red straw and she drank a third of it right off.

“Guess what,” she said. “Roland’s shutting me down again.”

“Since when?”

“I don’t know. A week or so.”

“How will you pay for this?”

“Good question. I can’t.”

“All right.”

“Pierre, I swear, if you told me right now I could snap my fingers and make him disappear, I would do it.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

She set the drink down, raised her hands on either side of her face, and snapped her fingers.

“You’d feel like shit if he really disappeared.”

“Well, he’s not going to, so it doesn’t matter.”

“He gets mad, you get mad, it’s a vicious cycle.”

“He told you he was mad.”

“He mentioned something about the car.”

“Well, yes. The car. And fuck him. He should marry
that
if he loves it so much.”

“That you hit a gas pump.”

“No. A cement post at the gas station that’s, like, the most deceptive post ever. So he says no money until that’s fixed.”

“You work. Why don’t you just cash your check?”

“Oh, because we have this idiotic system, which I let him talk me into a long time ago. That if one of us makes more than the other, they’re entitled to everything the other one makes. But they have to dole it
out fairly, of course. Like it’s fair that I don’t even have five bucks for smokes.”

“Never heard of such a thing.”

“Well, according to Roland, it’s common practice among couples.”

“Hell, I’ll give you five dollars,” said Pierre. “I’ll give you fifty.”

“Really? You have that much?”

He took his billfold out and opened it. “I’ve got twenty-three dollars.”

“Give me eighteen. I don’t want to take all your money.”

Pierre counted out eighteen dollars and gave it to Carrie and put his billfold away.

“Something’s different about you,” she said.

“I graduated from beer school,” said Pierre. “That was a rite of passage.”

“Hey. Are you in love?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, Pierre Hunter. Who with?”

“Don’t tell anybody.”

“Okay.”

“Her name is Stella Rosmarin.”

Carrie shook her head. “Why is that name familiar?”

“If you’ve ever seen her you would remember.”

“No. I know what it is. It’s a kind of rose. A Rosmarin rose.”

*  *  *

Pierre figured it must be a well-known mistake to intervene between a wife and a husband. There were people who did that for a job and they had many years of training, and even they probably only fucked things up half the time.

But none of this was quite real. Roland and Carrie could only talk of their problems, and Pierre could only give advice, in a joking way.

You learned this as a bartender—to humor people in their troubles rather than get all sincere about them. It might have been that the humoring was better anyway. It might let people think things were not so bad and therefore could be worked out. That’s what a lot of people came to a bar for anyway.

Of course, what the counselor in beer school had said was that if you drink to make things seem not so bad then those same things will seem worse than ever in the middle of the night when the alcohol burns off.

The counselor would not concede that alcohol had any function at all beyond blind destruction. He made liquor seem like a totally inexplicable historical development.

Once in a class Pierre said what seemed obvious to him, that a few drinks enabled people to drop their inhibitions and talk. Even though, yes, there might be—there are—healthier ways to do that. But the counselor reacted as if Pierre had said that a few
drinks enabled people to flap their arms and fly like birds.

And everyone in the class sided with the counselor, as they did not want to be held back for another session.

Anyway, the next time Pierre saw Roland—at the Family Lanes bowling alley in Rainville—he told him to quit hoarding the money.

“This is a person who works for a living, in America where, for all its many faults, you do get your money,” said Pierre. “She doesn’t have five dollars for cigarettes.”

“Oh, yeah, the cigarettes,” said Roland. “That makes sense as a point of speaking. But who is she smoking with? That’s the question.”

“Why? Who is she smoking with?”

“How about it’s that kid who works on the golf carts, which is why they don’t work, because he’s standing around breathing smoke on Carrie all the time.”

“You’re just jealous,” said Pierre.

“Of course I am,” said Roland. “You know how cute she is.”

Pierre made his approach and laid down a green-marbled bowling ball that went on to pick up a seven-ten spare.

“Well, anyway, you owe me eighteen bucks,” he said.

The summer came on hot and still. Cars on gravel raised clouds of dust that could be seen for miles, and
the sun seemed to develop a personal interest in anyone who moved beneath it.

Boaters and swimmers flocked to Lens Lake and business picked up at the Jack of Diamonds, owing to its quiet and powerful air conditioning. The dark bar was a good place to be on hot nights, and the red leatherette chairs were gone, replaced by wooden ones from Italy.

One night after work, Pierre went to see Stella. It was around two in the morning when he got there. The treetops framed a column of sky, into which the little house seemed poised to take off, and the moon cast soft blue light on the clapboards.

Pierre shut the car off and walked across the thick and uncut grass. It was still hot, 80 degrees or more. He had no idea whether Stella would welcome him at this time of night. She had said to come back anytime but Pierre had a hard time trusting signs of attraction unless they were totally transparent.

He had left himself an out by bringing her something.

It was a model boat he had made. It seemed fairly idiotic, now that he was here and holding the boat in his hands. But at least if she did not want him to stay he could say he only meant to drop it off and be on his way.

The house was dark except for two lights, one on the stove panel in the kitchen and one upstairs. And of course there was no car. Had she cleared out entirely, the place might look exactly this way.

He knocked and after a moment heard a noise from the second floor. The screen window hinged at the top and Stella had pushed it open and was looking down.

“Pierre?” she said.

“Hi,” he said. “Is it too late?”

“Come up,” she said. “The door’s unlocked.”

He walked into the house, waited a moment, and climbed the stairs. She stood in the doorway with the light of the room behind her. She wore a little more than she had the last time he saw her but because it was underwear it was more exciting.

Funny how that works, thought Pierre.

“Here,” he said. “I made this for you.”

She lifted the boat in her hands and closed one eye to look down the hull. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

“It’s a replica of what they call the Gokstad ship,” said Pierre. “That’s all wood, by the way. Well, except the sail, of course, is cloth.”

“This would be the Vikings?”

“Yeah. They think it was a burial ship built around the year nine hundred.”

“And you made this?” she said.

“Yeah. You can have it if you want.”

“Christ, I love it,” she said.

They went into the bedroom, where she set the boat on the dresser. There were sixteen oars on either rail
and they were angled downward to enable the model to stand on its own.

“I’ll put it here where I can look at it and think of you putting it together.”

“It’s kind of stupid, but—”

“No, it’s not,” said Stella. “You don’t have to feel that way. Pierre, listen to me. Whatever is bad, you didn’t cause it. You can feel good if you want to.”

She raised her hands with fingers apart as if she had counted ten things. “Wouldn’t that be better? Isn’t that what you want?”

He laced his fingers in hers. “I want you,” he said. “And there, I’ve said it.”

Still holding Pierre’s hands, Stella drew her arms back, pulling the two of them together, and she pressed his hands to the small of her back.

It was very graceful, how she did that. He could feel the ribbed cloth of her undershirt and the hem of it and the warm skin beneath.

“You’re the one I’ve been waiting for,” she said.

A woman had once told Pierre that men mistake sex for love, or maybe it was love for sex, he could not remember how it went, and maybe that only proved her point. But he thought there should be love in it, or created by it, and maybe this was why he hadn’t slept with too many people.

Of course it wasn’t always what it could be. Sometimes there was a disappointing sense of a favor being granted, and reluctantly at that, a sense of calculation and separation, and this reduced the experience from ecstatic union to a hybrid of gymnastics and accounting, and all in all it could be kind of tense and gloomy.

With Stella it was not like that. She was wild and lovely and drew no line between what she gave and what she took. She wanted and Pierre wanted what they were after equally, or sometimes one a little more, and sometimes the other, and the differences gave way to creativity rather than isolation.

And what were they after? It was not only the good feeling of friction and slide, though that was much of it. Maybe there was a time before individual minds when sensation fell on the world and all knew it the same. It was something like that. To find that time and live it one night. To join together, as in the wedding vows. It was like the word that Pierre had spoken of that time he was drunk—which time, there were so many—the word that would say everything, and the word was the sound of breathing.

They made love all through the night. It was hot in the room and then cooler as the early morning drifted in the windows, until at last they shivered under the covers, played out and a little deranged. There was a
light on, a standing lamp with an orange shade. The wiring was bad and it kept going on and off. Sometimes it would stay on for a while and then again it would strobe, and the light in its changeable modes seemed to urge them on. And they would sleep, but lightly, each with the awareness of the other held close.

Once they woke and they were still together and she lay on him with her hands touching his face and her head beneath his chin.

“So, what are you doing this summer?” she said, and he could feel the vibration of her voice in his chest.

They laughed. She rose on her golden arms and looked at him.

“You mean like a vacation?” he said.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“I usually go to California in August. A cousin of mine lives out there with her family. But I don’t know if I will this year.”