The Hotel Eden: Stories (6 page)

“You didn’t screw me around, Keith. You didn’t give me a whirl.” Barbara moved his hand and then put her arms around his neck so she could speak in his ear. She could see some of the people watching them. “You made love to me, Keith. It wasn’t a joke. You made love to me and I met you tonight to say—good for you. Extreme times require extreme solutions.” She was whispering as they stood alone on that carpet in their embrace. “I wondered how it was going to happen, but you were a surprise. Way to go. What did you think? That I wanted to go off to college an eighteen-year-old virgin? That pajama bit was great; I’ll remember it.” Now people were deplaning, entering the gate area and streaming around the young couple. Barbara felt Keith begin to tremble, and she closed her eyes. “It wasn’t a joke. There’s this: I made love to you too. You were there, remember? I’m glad for it.” She pulled back slightly and found his lips. For a moment she was keenly aware of the public scene they were making, but that disappeared and they twisted tighter and were just there, kissing. She had dropped the valise and when the mock ticket slipped from her fingers behind his neck, a young woman in a business suit knelt and retrieved it and tapped Barbara on the hand. Barbara clutched the ticket and dropped her head to Keith’s chest.

“I remember,” he said. “My memory is aces.”

“Tell me, Keith,” she said. “What are these people thinking? Make something up.”

“No need. They’ve got it right. That’s why we came out here. They think we’re saying goodbye.”

S
IMPLY PUT
,
THAT
was the last time Barbara Anderson saw Keith Zetterstrom. That fall when she arrived in Providence for her freshman year at Brown, there was one package waiting for her, a large trophy topped by a girl on a motorcycle. She had seen it before. She kept it in her dorm window, where it was visible four stories from the ground, and she told her roommates that it meant a lot to her, that it represented a lot of fun and hard work but her goal had been to win the Widowmaker Hill Climb, and once she had done that, she sold her bikes and gave up her motorcycles forever.

T
HERE WAS A
camera. Mr. Ruckelbar was helping load the crushed sedan onto DiPaulo’s tow truck when an old Nikon camera fell from the gashed trunk well and hit him on the shoulder. At first he thought it was a rock or a taillight assembly; things had fallen on him before as he and DiPaulo had wrestled the ruined vehicles onto the tiltbed of DiPaulo’s big custom Ford, and of course DiPaulo wasn’t there to be hit. He had a bad back and was in the cab working the hydraulics and calling, “Good? Are we good yet?”

“Whoa, that’s enough!” he called. Now Ruckelbar would have to clamber up and set the chains. DiPaulo, he thought, the wrecker with the bad back.

It was a thick gray twilight in the last week of October, chilly now with the sun gone. This vehicle had been out back for too long. The end of summer was always bad. After the Labor Day weekend, he always took in a couple cars. He stored them out in a fenced lot behind his Sunoco station, getting twenty dollars a week until the insurance paperwork was completed, all of them the same really, totaled and sold to DiPaulo, who took them out to Junk World, his four acres of damaged vehicles near Torrington. Ruckelbar was glad to see this silver Saab go. It had been weird having the kid almost every afternoon since it had arrived, sitting out in the crushed thing full of leaves and beads of glass, just sitting there until dark sometimes, then walking back toward town along the two-lane without a proper jacket, some boy, the brother he said he was, some kid you didn’t need sitting in a totaled Saab, some skinny kid maybe fourteen years old.

Ruckelbar cinched the final chain hitch and climbed down. “What’d you get?” It was DiPaulo. The small old man had limped back in the new dark and had picked the camera up. “This has got to be worth something.”

“It’s that kid’s. It was his sister’s car.”

DiPaulo handed him back the camera. “That kid. That kid doesn’t need to see this. I’d chuck it in the river before I let him see it. He’s nutty enough.” DiPaulo shook his head. “What’s he going to do when he sees the car is finally gone?”

“Lord knows,” Ruckelbar said. “Maybe he’ll find someplace else to go.”

“Well, that car’s been here a long time, summer’s over, and that camera,” DiPaulo poked it with one of his short stained fingers, “is long gone to everybody. Let you leave the sleeping dogs asleep. Just put it in a drawer. You listen to your old pal. Your father would.” DiPaulo took Ruckelbar’s shoulder in his hand for a second. “See you. I’ll be back Wednesday for that van. You take care.” The little old man turned one more time and pointed at Ruckelbar. “And for god’s sakes, don’t tell that kid where this car is going.”

DiPaulo had known Ruckelbar’s father, “for a thousand years before you came along,” he’d say, and Ruckelbar could remember DiPaulo saying “Leave sleeping dogs asleep” throughout the years in friendly arguments every time there was some sort of cash windfall. The elder Ruckelbar would smile and say that DiPaulo should have been a tax attorney.

After DiPaulo left, Ruckelbar rolled the wooden desk chair back inside the office of the Sunoco station and locked up. The building was a local landmark really, such an old little stone edifice painted blue, sitting all alone out on Route 21, where the woods had grown up around it and made it appear a hut in a fairy tale, with two gas pumps. The Bluestone everyone called it, and it was used to mark the quarry turnoff; “four miles past the Bluestone.” It certainly marked Ruckelbar’s life, was his life. He had met Clare at a community bonfire at the Quarry Meadows when she was still a student at Woodbine Prep, and above there at the Upper Quarry, remote and private, one night a year later she had helped him undo both of them in his father’s truck and urgently had begun a sex life that wouldn’t last five years.

Ruckelbar was a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts when his father had a heart attack in the station that March and died sitting up against the wall in the single-bay garage. Ruckelbar was twenty and when he came home it would stick. Clare was back from Sarah Lawrence that summer, and it was all right for a while, even good, the way anything can be good when you’re young. It was fun having a service station, and after closing they’d go to the pubs beyond the blue-collar town of Garse, roadhouses that are all gone now. It was thrilling for Clare to sit in his pickup, the station truck, the same truck in which she arched herself against him at Upper Quarry and the same truck he drives now, as he rocked the huge set of keys in the latch of Bluestone and then extracted them and turned to her for a night. But she didn’t think he was serious about it. He was to be an engineer; his father had said as much, and then another year passed, his mother now ill, while he ran the place all winter, plowing the snow from around the station with a blade on the old truck that his father had welded himself. When spring came it was a done deal. The wild iris and the dogwoods burst from every seam in the earth and the world changed for Ruckelbar, his sense of autonomy and worth, and he knew he was here for life. Even by the time they married, Clare had had enough. When she saw that the little baby girl she had the next year gave her no leverage with him, she stopped coming out with box lunches and avoided driving by the place even when she had to drive to Garse going by way of Tipton, which added four miles to the trip. She let him know that she didn’t want to hear about Bluestone in her house and that he was to leave his overalls at the station, his boots in the garage, and he was to shower in the basement.

He’d gone along with this somehow, gone along without an angry word, without many words at all, the separate bedroom in the nice house in Corbett, and now after nearly twenty years, it was their way. After the loss of Clare and then the loss of the memory of her in his truck and in his bed came the loss of his daughter, which he also just allowed. Clare had her at home and Clare was determined that Marjorie should understand the essential elements of disappointment, and the lessons started with his name. Now, at seventeen, Marjorie was a day student at Woodbine, the prep school in Corbett, and her name was Marjorie Bar, shortened Clare said for convenience and for her career, whatever it would be. And Ruckelbar had let that happen too. He could fix any feature of any automobile, truck, or element of farm equipment, but he could not fix this.

A
T HOME AFTER
a silent dinner with Clare, he broke the rule about talking about the station and told her that DiPaulo had picked up the car, the one the boy had been sitting in every day for weeks. She didn’t like DiPaulo—he’d always been part of the way her life had betrayed her—and she let her eyes lift in disgust and then asked about the boy, “What did he do?” They were clearing the supper dishes. Marjorie ate dinner at school and arrived home after the evening study hall. It was queer that Clare should ask a question, and Ruckelbar, who hadn’t intended his comment to begin a conversation, was surprised and not sure of how he should answer.

“He sat in the car. In the driver’s seat.”

This stopped Clare midstep and she held her dishes still. “All day?”

“He came after school and walked home after dark.” It was the most Ruckelbar had spoken about the station in his kitchen for five or six years. Clare resumed sorting out the silverware and wiping up. Ruckelbar realized he wanted to ask Clare what to do about the camera. “Do you remember the accident?” he asked. “The girl?”

“If it’s the same girl. The three young people from Garse. She was a tramp. They were killed on Labor Day or just before. They went off the quarry road.”

Ruckelbar, who hadn’t seen the papers, had known about the accident, of course. The police tow truck driver had told him about the three students, and the vehicle was crushed in so radical a fashion anyone could see it had fallen some distance onto the rock. Clare seemed to know more about it, something she’d read or heard, but Ruckelbar didn’t know how to ask, and in a moment the chance was lost.

“Who’s a tramp?” Marjorie entered the kitchen, putting her bookbag on a chair.

“Your father has some lowlife living in a car.”

Ruckelbar looked at her.

“Any pie?” Marjorie asked her mother. Clare extracted a pumpkin pie from the fridge. Under the plastic wrap, it was uncut, one of Clare’s fresh pumpkin pies. Ruckelbar looked at it, just a pie, and he stopped slipping. He’d already exited the room in his head, and he came back. “I’d like a piece of that pie, too, Clare. If I could please.”

“You didn’t get any?” Marjorie said. “You must really smell like gasoline tonight.” She was actually trying to be light.

“He’s not a lowlife, Clare,” he said to her as she set a wedge of pie before him and dropped a fork onto the table. Even Marjorie, who had silently sided with her mother every time she’d had the chance, looked up in surprise at Clare. “It’s the boy whose sister was killed last summer.”

“Sheila Morton,” Marjorie said.

“The tramp,” Clare said.

Ruckelbar took a bite of pie. He was going to stay right here. This was the scene he’d drifted away from a thousand times. They were talking.

“She was not a tramp,” he said. “This boy is a nice boy.”

“He’s disturbed,” Clare said. “God, going out there to sit in the car?”

“Sheila was a slut,” Marjorie said. “Everybody knew that.”

The moment had gone very strange for all of them together like this in the kitchen. An ordinary night would have found Ruckelbar in the garage or his bedroom, Marjorie on the phone, and Clare at the television. They all felt the vague uncertainty of having the rules shift. No one would leave and no one knew how it would end; this was all new.

“She was, Dad,” Marjorie said, setting Ruckelbar back in his chair with the word “Dad,” which in its disuse had become monumental, naked and direct. They all heard it. Marjorie went on, “She put out, okay? One of those guys was from Woodbine. What do you think they were doing? They were headed for the Upper Quarry. It’s where the sluts go. You don’t try that road unless you’re going to put out.”

Ruckelbar had stopped eating the pie. He put down his fork and turned: Clare was gone.

A
SUNNY
S
ATURDAY
in New England the last day in October: Ruckelbar lives for days like these, maybe this day in particular, the sun even at noon fallen away hard, but the lever of heat still there, though more than half the leaves are down and they skirl across Route 21 and pool against the banks of old grass. Ruckelbar sits in his old wooden office chair, which he pulls out front on days just like this, the whole scene a throwback to any fall afternoon thirty years ago, that being Clare’s word, “throwback,” but for now he’s free in what feels like the very last late sunlight of the year. It’s Halloween, he remembers; tonight they turn their clocks back. It doesn’t matter. For now, he’s simply going to sit in the place which has become the place he belongs, a place where he is closest to being happy, no, pleased he never moved, pleased to have this place paid for and not be running the Citgo in town chasing in circles regardless of the money, pleased to have the only station in the twelve miles of Route 21 between Garse and Corbett, nothing to look at across the street but trees rolling away toward Little Bear Mountain. Ruckelbar won’t make fifty dollars the whole day and he simply leans back in the sunshine, pleased to have his tools put away and the bay swept and the office neat, just pleased to have the afternoon. As he sits and lifts his face to the old sun, he feels it and he’s surprised that there is something else now, something new swimming underneath the ease he always feels at Bluestone, something about last night, and he tries to dismiss it but it will not be dismissed. It took years to achieve this separate peace and now something is coming undone.