This Is What I Want (20 page)

The New York Times
,
Saturday, August 1, 2015

If a single self-proffered theme emerged during Grandview’s Jamboree weekend, it was the one struck by Mr. Swarthbeck: this is a special place, different from and better than the average small towns that dot this corner of Montana.

On the surface, this might be viewed as a debatable claim. Once you get east of Billings, Montana is mostly empty space, and the towns that do exist are not unlike Grandview. The demographics are older and white, most cling to some central identity, and most are led by people who wonder where the next generation of leaders will come from. Most, too, are suffering from a steady loss of population as Montanans, much like their contemporaries in the country at large, migrate toward urban centers. What separates Grandview, and its larger neighbor Sidney, is the proximity to oil. Thus, the town is growing, and in ways that put traditional community values and the uncomfortable aspects of the present at odds.

“I couldn’t wait to get away from here,” says the town’s only famous son, novelist Raleigh Ridgeley, who sets much of his award-winning fiction in the part of the state known as the Big Empty. “As a young person, I didn’t see what a place like this held for me, or someone who saw the world the way I was beginning to.”

Now, Ridgeley returns every year for Jamboree, where he holds a discussion of his books and the larger themes of his fiction called, informally, The Raleigh Ridgeley Book Club. The author, 53, splits his time between houses in Billings and Scottsdale, Ariz.

“You have to understand the people. These folks come from ancestors who looked at this vast, empty, brutal landscape and saw opportunity,” he says. “That’s not an easy vision now, even with the oil, so you can imagine what it was then. That kind of relationship with the land toughens you up in ways that are hard to explain. You learn to take a punch. You learn to find optimism you didn’t know you had.”

SUNDAY

PATRICIA

Once Patricia settled her mind on the question of what she wanted, she slipped into the night-black bedroom and found her husband’s snoozing, swaddled head, and she kissed him on the cheek and she said, “I’ve never stopped loving you.” He stirred a bit, and she swept back his surrendering hair to calm him.

She might have stayed at his side if not for the subsequent realization of why. That’s what sent her into the night to ensure that there would be no further misunderstandings.

Now, she sat alone on a stool at the Top Hat in Sidney, draining a beer that she’d have never chosen were she here with friends or with Sam, trying to sort out in her own head the explanation that she figured she would be compelled to offer. The reasons made sense to her—for the first time, it all made sense from the outside and the inside—and yet she could fixate on no system of language for communicating it to someone else, least of all to Raleigh.

Yes, she loved his work. Yes, she envied his life. Yes, she wondered. Yes, she fantasized. God, yes, she fantasized. No, she did not want to grab his proffered hand and take a leap with him, tempting as that might have been in the moment he suggested it. Yes, she still loved Sam. God, yes, she loved him.

She finished the last of her drink and sized up the room. She figured she was the oldest here by ten years, at least, and one of only three women. The bartender asked if she wanted another, and she said, “No, thank you, I have somewhere else to be.” She set a ten on the bar and made for the door.

The interior pep talk continued in the car on the way to Raleigh’s motel, and she wondered now if she were trying to convince herself rather than him. She didn’t think so. She just wanted to be precise, so that her clarity could also be his once she’d unpacked it. Raleigh had been kind and attentive, and that had gone a long way toward opening her lonely heart. She didn’t want to lose the friendship or the anticipation of the many Jamborees to come, the many books to come, all of which she would cherish.

She pulled into the Lazy Z parking lot and counted the doors to number eight. He would be impressed that she’d remembered that tossed-off bit of information from two days ago, given all that had happened in the hours since.

The lights were off. She considered stepping back into the car and going home and leaving this errand behind. And then she found a reserve of gumption and stepped forward.

Two crisp raps on the door set off audible motion on the other side. She smiled as she pictured Raleigh, fumbling about in his underwear and looking for his glasses, his horseshoe of hair whipping this way and that.

The curtains peeled back a bit from the window, then fell back into place.

The door opened far enough for Raleigh’s bewildered head to peek out.

“Patricia.”

She ran her hands down her hips, as if she could wipe away the oddity of the hour or the audacity of her reason for being there. “Hi, Raleigh.”

“What—”

“I really need to talk to you. I know this is strange. But it can’t—”

“What are you doing here?”

Patricia might have answered, until an arm coiled around his midsection and a voice broke into the clear. “Baby, come back to bed.” Patricia leaned her head in and recognized the server from the coffee shop.

Raleigh looked at Patricia, and his color emptied out.

“Oh,” she said.

“Wait a minute.”

“No. I’m going to go.”

“Wait.”

“I can’t.”

In her shame, Patricia drove first for the eastern hills, crossing the river, and stretching the run into barren North Dakota, until sensibility returned to her and she realized she had nowhere to go out there, and that she would have to bury her embarrassment—and, yes, her anger—somewhere between here and home. She turned around on an oil-well access road and drove west toward the Sidney lights, and then, at last, north toward Grandview.

As she passed the Lazy Z, she wanted to avert her eyes but couldn’t help herself. Number eight was lit up, her interruption of Raleigh’s evening continuing even as she wished she could just teleport back to the other side of midnight and stay by Sam’s side.

She pressed on. She felt foolish. Stupid. What did she care, anyway? Had she not gone to tell him that the notion of a future together was a dead end?

Well, yes, she told herself, that much was true. Also true: he’d bagged the first piece of ass he could after she’d left him to attend to Sam. All those pretty words, and they meant nothing.

She whipped the car to the side of the highway and pulled her phone from her purse.

A text message from Samuel:
Where are you?

Be back soon,
she texted back.

She scared up the number of the Lazy Z and placed the call. An automated answering service let her punch through to Raleigh’s room.

“Hello?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“Where are you?”

“You are an asshole.”

“What?” She sensed exasperation from him, and that sent her emotions tumbling again, to sorrow and rage and shame, at once.

“I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. But you are. You’re a fucking asshole.” The words came out clipped and heavy, each one a hammer. “That girl, she’s what, thirteen—”

“Twenty-three.”

“I’m not being literal, you idiot.”

“Come back,” he said. “Come back and we’ll talk.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“I can’t.”

She hung up.

She then set the phone in her purse, dropped her face into her hands, and allowed herself to cry. She lifted her head and looked at the clock, glowing in the silent dark. She would give herself two minutes, and then she would dab her face and put drops in her eyes, and then she would go home and she would be done with this forever.

That’s what she would do. Life is about plans. She had one. Simple as that. Just do it.

Her head dropped, and she let herself go.

SAM

When at last Sam heard the car idle and then settle in the driveway, he stood from the kitchen table and made his way to the foyer. He wanted to be the first person Patricia saw. She would have to deal with him now, in the moment, not later, on her own terms. The hell with his drumming head and his pain. He would do this now and do it right.

She came silently up the outside stairs, her head down, and he thrilled when she jumped back upon seeing him there on the other side of the glass, like some bandaged-up Bela Lugosi.
Good evening
.

Samuel had rooted her out by sending a text message. “Dad, she said she’ll be back soon,” he’d said, and that was all fine and dandy, but where had she gone and why? He could think of no good place and no good reason, and he’d told his son to go ahead and turn in, that nothing and no one would be served by a mass interrogation. He’d said the same to Denise when she came upstairs for a glass of water. “Just go back to sleep, baby. We’ll see you in the morning.”

Patricia, her senses gathered about her, opened the door. “You’re awake,” she said.

“I realized I was alone.”

“I stepped out for a bit.”

“I’d like to know why.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. She tried to move past him, but he stood, immobile.

“It does. To me, it does,” he said.

She lowered her head, then brought it up again. He thought she’d been crying. She looked as though she might start again.

“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go in the bedroom.”

As she unburdened herself, he found no satisfaction in having predicted all of it. While the minutes she was gone had piled up, he’d sat silently in the kitchen, even after Samuel came to keep him company, and he’d slowly unfurled ever more scurrilous reasons that she should be absent. The worst and most likely was that she’d had a rendezvous with Raleigh. Sam knew things—more than he let on, and more than she seemed to give him credit for knowing.

“So you love him, then,” he said.

“No. No. I love you.”

“Which is why you were with him.”

She reached for his hand, and he pulled it away from her.

“I wasn’t with him. I went to him, to tell him something.”

“What?”

“That I love you, and that I couldn’t be with him.”

Sam knew well the feeling of being hollowed out. Losing Big Herschel just when he’d pretty much convinced himself his father would live forever—that was hard. Losing his own son by degrees, by cuts and nicks and blemishes and misunderstandings—that was brutal. Having no way to reach his brother’s shore—that was tragic. But this was something else, a swamping emptiness that carved him up from the inside.

“So you thought about it,” he said.

She again reached for him, and again he denied her. “Sam, we’ve been at this too long for me to try to sell you something that isn’t the truth. Yes, I thought about it. Don’t you get that? Haven’t you ever thought about it? It’s been thirty-two years. Isn’t it just, I don’t know, natural?”

“I have never thought about it,” he said, defiant, and he knew it was a lie, but the anger was coming out faster than he could process it now, sliding sideways, reckless. He wanted to say something that hurt.

She’d been crying since they sat down on the bed. Weeping. This was a night for sorrow. And now, Sam felt his own eyes spill. He wiped the leavings away.

“Have you kissed him?”

He watched her intently, and she matched him. “Yes.”

“You’re a slut.” He was reaching wildly now, he knew, for the extremities of what he could say that would hurt her the most, and he dove toward those.

She bit her lip. “If that makes you feel better.”

“How many times?”

“Twice.”

Sam felt his air leave him. “I wish I were dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t love you anymore,” he said, and the dagger effect he’d intended for her buried itself in him instead. Behind it, anger cascaded in again, a river looking for a sea to empty its load.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t. I don’t want you in this room. Get out.”

He lay back on the bed and turned until his back was to her. The inside of his skull felt as though his brain were being wrung like a dishrag. He closed his eyes, and he listened, and he offered nothing but abject silence until she got up, gathered her nightclothes, and left the room, latching the door behind her. He opened his eyes again and watched his own fuzzy shadow cast against the wall in front of him, and listened as the blades of the ceiling fan cut away at the suffocating air.

SAMUEL

Samuel lay in bed and took in every syllable of the awfulness playing out a door over. More than once, he thought he ought to retrieve his earbuds and cue up some music on his phone, and every time he squelched that plan in favor of continuing to eavesdrop. He didn’t want to know any of this, and yet he figured not knowing would be worse.

His phone buzzed. He checked it. Denise, downstairs.

Can you believe this bullshit?

No,
he wrote back.

We’re leaving in the morning. Shame on Mom.

Nobody is coating themselves in glory tonight.

You should go, too. Maybe you had the right idea.

No. I’m staying. It will look better in the morning.

Suit yourself.

He heard the door open and then close. Footfalls across the hardwood. The creaking of the couch as his mother settled in.

He turned on his light and went to the closet, rooting through the boxed-up remainders of the life he’d once had here, until he found the stack of blankets she always stored for the winter nights that left his room, facing north, so much colder than the rest of the house. He chose a thin one, a lightly woven wool, and he carried it into the living room and lay it across her.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and she reached across the distance. He put his hand out and grasped hers.

“It’s going to be OK,” he said.

“Promise?” She said it with a hopeful lilt.

“It’s going to be OK. I love you. Good night.”