Wolf Point (12 page)

They looked sad, both of them, as they walked slowly over the rocky ground, their eyes cast downward, Lester trailing a little behind Jenny. When they were close to the cabin, only a moment before they moved out of T’s line of sight, Lester reached out for Jenny’s hand and pulled her back to him. Jenny looked toward the cabin, as if to be sure she wasn’t being watched, and then gave Lester a warm hug and fixed his hair where the wind had mussed it. He kissed her on the forehead, and they continued, hand in hand, until they disappeared from view. T sat down again at the table and sipped his coffee, and in another moment they were at the front door.

“We made up,” Jenny said, sitting down to her eggs and attacking them hungrily.

Lester winked at T. “I was jealous,” he said. He took a bite of egg and made a face. “They’re cold.”

“Still good,” Jenny said, breaking a yolk with a slice of bread. “I think I was starving.”

“What did you make up about?” T asked.

Jenny said, “I admitted I was being bitchy.”

“And I should have asked you before I took the car and the money,” Lester said. “Sorry about that.”

“I told him you were worried,” Jenny said. “I told him you thought he’d taken off.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “Jenny knew I wouldn’t do anything like that.”

“Okay,” T said. “I have my wallet back. The car’s parked out front. I don’t see any real harm done.”

“There you go,” Lester said. He took another bite of egg and then pushed the plate away.

“But we should talk about where we’re going from here, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely.” Lester slapped the table enthusiastically. “And we should do it while we’re fishing.”

Jenny laughed. “He bought fishing gear and rented an outboard motor.”

“You rented an outboard?”

With a grin, Lester said, “Guy at the marina owns cabin number 3. That’s his boat down by the rocks.”

“So you rented the outboard and the boat,” T said, “and you bought fishing gear? What did you buy?”

“Couple of poles, line, bait—it’s all in the boat. We’re ready to go.”

“And how much did this all cost?” T asked. “Because I only noticed a fifty missing, and you can’t rent a boat and an outboard, outfit two people to go fishing, and buy groceries, an apron, and a sundress, all for fifty dollars. I don’t care how depressed this area is.”

“Well,” Lester said, “I kind of used your credit cards a bit too.”

T looked down at the table a moment, then back up at Lester. They both laughed.

“You said you were rich,” Lester said. “I figured, what’s a few hundred to a rich guy?”

“I assume both cards are back in my wallet?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay,” T said. “So. We’re going fishing. Is there a plan beyond that?”

“Let’s talk about it,” Lester said, pushing his chair back from the table.

“And you?” T said to Jenny.

“I want to lie down a bit,” she said. “I thought I might warm some water in the fireplace and take a bath too. I saw a couple of big metal buckets by the propane tank.”

“Nothing you won’t do to get a hot bath,” Lester said.

T asked, “You want some help getting the fire going again?”

“I can handle it,” she said, getting up from the table. “You boys have you some fun fishing,” she said, putting on her Southern accent. “Hear?” She smiled, looking suddenly tired, and turned and walked slowly out of the kitchen with T and Lester both staring after her.

Tstretched out on the bed while Lester went down to the boat ahead of him—he had told Lester that he’d join him in a moment—and he found himself wondering what Alicia would say if she could somehow see him here, if somehow she
could walk like a ghost around the cabin and see Jenny in the bathroom and him in the bed taking a moment for himself before going fishing with Lester. No doubt she would be perplexed. She would have a hard time figuring out T taking up with Jenny and hanging out with Lester. In those last years before the divorce, she had come to see T as a simple bore. The marriage was already dead those last few years, though T hadn’t known it. He thought it was only changed and quieted after the children had grown and gone off to start their own lives. Free from the responsibility of children and still relatively young, Alicia had gone back to work in the city, acting when she could, volunteering where needed, keeping busy, spending most nights in Manhattan. While T did what? He could hardly remember. He called people on the phone. He set up appointments. He visited sites, hired workers, negotiated contracts. He watched football. That he remembered. He watched a lot of football. Dinner and a movie or a play was a big night out. The guy who might spend a day wandering through a museum, that guy was long gone. Sundays he spent mostly on the couch watching games. Weekdays he was busy. Really, he was always busy. When he thought back to himself in those years, he saw a man on the phone, a man in traffic, a man going somewhere or coming back, while his wife was somewhere else, doing something else, which was fine with him because it meant she was entertained and thus he didn’t have to worry about keeping her happy, which he was too busy to worry about, busy doing a lot of things that would all come, only a few years later, to nothing.

When she came to see him in Salem, after the divorce, she had rushed into an old argument, intent, it seemed, on delivering a final blow. “You’re a void,” she told him. “You’re a vacuum, an abyss, a black hole.” T had long ago gotten used to her overblown rhetoric, her dramatic posturing. It was to be expected when married to an actress. She was making the argument she had made for many years, that there was something lacking in him, that he was directionless, that having no desire of his own, he relied on others to shape his life, to give him purpose. It was an argument that used to infuriate him. He had built a series of businesses from scratch to the point where they were making millions—money that she had no problem whatsoever spending. What was that, building those businesses, if not ambition? That took work. Hard work.

The kitchen wallpaper in Salem pictured red and yellow blossoms on a white background. He had made a note to tear it down as soon as he moved in, and of course never did. Alicia in her New-York-artist black—black shoes, black pants, black top—gave the impression of being superimposed over the kitchen wall, a kind of digital special effect. She was thin, as always, but her skin seemed more vibrant, more healthy than he remembered. She was still an attractive woman. Not a stunning beauty, but beautifully interesting in her looks, her angular, lithe body, her newly blond hair, which was thin and streaked with platinum.

“A black hole?” he asked from his seat at the table, resting his head on his hand, looking up at her where she stood over him with her hands on her hips. “Really?”

“Yes,” she said. “A black hole.” She seemed nervous—jittery with a kind of anxious energy that suggested she was scared, scared about being there in Salem, in his house, alone with him. Yet she had made the long drive. She had called him. She said she needed to talk. Then, within moments of coming through the door, before they even made it out of the kitchen, she exploded into her lecture. T looked up at her. She stared back at him. Her look said she was frightened. Her eyes filled with tears.

He said, “Don’t you think you’re being slightly dramatic?”

“No,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Look, T,” she said, “I don’t know what happened, but at some point, I stopped being a real person to you. Actually, I don’t know that I was ever— To you, that I was ever—”

T said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Alicia.”

“I think maybe,” she went on, as if still working through the problem, “it’s women— For you— We’re like place mats, in some ways, like accessories.”

T wondered if he had heard her correctly. “Women are like place mats to me? Is that what you just said?”

“You don’t see,” she answered. “At least you got to be that way—or maybe you never did. I don’t know. But I know, eventually, you couldn’t see anybody but yourself.” She wiped her eyes and took a seat beside him. She spoke as if patiently explaining his own life to him. “You married Brooke because she offered you money and a way to live after you’d been drifting for years. After Brooke walked out on you, you married me because I gave you a family and, again, a way to live. And
then you just disappeared. You went away, T. You left it to me to run everything that wasn’t business, that wasn’t work. You used me, T. To raise your daughter, to— Can you tell me one vacation you planned? One trip that was your idea? One move that you wanted? Anything? Any activity, any anything in our life that you initiated? Can you tell me anything at all that was yours?”

“Maura,” he said. “Maura was mine.”

“Maura was Brooke’s!” she shouted. “Until I took over. Have you noticed she’s more in touch with me than she is with her own father? Why do you think that is? She calls me twice a week from London. How often does she call you, Tom?”

T looked down at his belly and closed his eyes. He laid his hands flat on the tabletop, as if to steady himself.

“And Evan,” she went on, leaning closer to him. “Why is it that Evan won’t even talk to you? Don’t you even wonder about such things?”

“Could it be,” T said reasonably, meeting her eyes, “could it be that they both, thanks to you, think I’m a child molester?”

Alicia nodded and was silent. Her look suggested a deep sadness at the subject being raised. “I didn’t download that picture,” she said. “I thought you were just a monster of indifference, a monster of blindness, but when I saw that picture? When I saw that picture, I saw what a beast you really were. I almost died when I saw it. I think a part of me did die. I never would have believed—”

“Oh, shut up,” T said. He got out of his chair and gestured toward the back of the kitchen. “Do you see an audience? It’s
just me and you, Alicia, and you know goddamn well I’m no pervert, I’m no pedophile. That’s an ugly, ugly lie that you used to destroy me.”

“Now who’s being dramatic?”

“You think that’s dramatic?” He pointed out the window, toward the mountain. “I’m in fucking exile here!” he shouted. “I’m lost. I don’t have a clue—” He stopped when he heard what he was saying and saw the pity in Alicia’s eyes. “Fuck you,” he said calmly. “You try having your life ripped away from you in a matter of months and see whether or not you feel lost.”

“Okay,” Alicia said. She closed her eyes for a moment, as if pulling herself together. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what’s happened to you. I came here to tell you that.”

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s very kind of you.” He pulled out a bottle of chianti from its rack atop the refrigerator. “Will you have a glass?” he asked. She sat quietly at the table, not even looking at him. “I will,” he said, and went about opening it. He pulled a wine glass down from the cabinet above the microwave. “Why are you really here?” he asked. He held the glass out to her. “Are you sure you don’t want some?” he asked. “It’s a good chianti.”

“To tell you what happened,” she said, ignoring the offer.

T poured his wine and then leaned back against the sink.

“I fell in love,” she said. “I found a man who had something to give back to me, someone who could fill me up and not drain me.”

“Victor? The guy you’re living with now?” he said. “The failed actor? You came here to tell me you love him?”

She looked up at T then and leaned closer. She spoke carefully, as if intent on being understood. “He knows how to love a woman without draining her,” she said. “He knows who he is and what he wants from this life. He doesn’t
use
women.”

“Good for him,” T said. “Did you really come all the way here just to tell me that? Really?”

“You’re not getting it,” she said. “You’re not hearing me.”

T considered what Alicia might be trying to tell him. “Before?” he said. “Are you saying— You were with him before—”

“For a long time before,” she said. “More than a year.” She looked furious. “What does it say, T, that you never had an inkling?”

T’s stomach was suddenly queasy, the way it got when he looked down from a great height. Along with the one incriminating picture he had downloaded, the one Alicia had turned him in for, the court had found other photographs, some more shocking than anything he had ever come across on his own. Where they came from had baffled him. All he could tell the court was that he had no way to explain their presence on his hard drive. He assumed that somehow the computer had downloaded them automatically, by itself, when he visited pornography sites, which he admitted to occasionally doing. It was how he found the one damning picture. He had browsed porn sites on occasion, and he knew computers could do such
things, cache pictures, save them in hidden places. He’d read stories of hackers hijacking people’s hard drives and using them for their own purposes. He thought perhaps something like that might have happened. Some freak had gotten his address from the one site he visited and then hijacked his computer and used it to store child pornography. It was the only explanation he could imagine. The court discounted it. They said he had to have been the one who downloaded the images. “Did you—” he asked Alicia. “Did you put those pictures there?”

“You put that picture there,” she said. “That little girl. I found it. I found it right on your desktop.”

“But the others,” he said. “The other—”

She nodded. “I was with Vic,” she said. “He knows computers. We were looking for your financial records. I had already decided to divorce you, and I didn’t trust you to be honest. When we found that picture—”

Leaning against the sink, T felt simultaneously heavy and light. His body was too heavy to move and yet it felt as though it might at any moment float up from the floor and drift away.

“It was a terrible thing to do,” she said. She wiped away a tear, roughly, with the back of her hand. “But that picture
was
yours. You
did
look at that filth. We went back to the exact same site you had downloaded it from—and we just downloaded some more.”

T said, “I just— The one picture…”

“That’s what you did, ignoring me, leering at—”