The Paris Wife

NINE

Ernest pushed off, suspending his body over the lake before he punched through. Coming to the surface again, he treaded water and faced the dock where Dutch and Luman sat and passed a bottle of rotgut back and forth, their voices carrying clearly over the water.

“Good form, Wem,” Dutch called out. “Can you teach me to dive like that?”

“No,” he called back. “I can’t teach anyone anything.”

“Do you have to be so stingy about it?” Dutch said with a snort, but Ernest didn’t feel like answering, so he balled himself up like a rock and let himself sink, falling through the lake until he bumped the mossy bottom and drifted there, the moss cool and strange against his toes.

Was it just last summer that Kate and Edgar had been on the dock eating stolen cherries and spitting the meaty pits at him as he bobbed nearby? Kate. Dear old Katy with the cat-green eyes and the smooth strong legs all the way to her rib cage. One night she had said, “You’re the doctor, examine me,” and he’d done it, counting each of her ribs with his hands, following the curve all the way around from her spine. She didn’t flinch or even laugh. When he reached her breast, she pushed the top of her bathing suit down while looking at him. He stopped moving his hands and tried to breathe.

“What are you thinking, Wemedge?”

“Nothing,” he said, working to keep his voice steady. Her nipple was perfect and he wanted to put his hand on it and then his mouth. He wanted to fall through Kate the way he liked to fall through the lake, but there were voices coming down the sandy path toward them. Kate straightened her suit. He stood up quickly and plunged into the water, feeling it burn him all over.

Now Kate was little more than a mile up the road in her aunt Charles’s cottage with Hadley, both of them in the same room in little beds that smelled like mildew. He knew that room well and all the rooms in the house, but found it hard to picture Hadley there or in any of the places he knew best. When he was a little boy, he’d learned to walk on the slope of patchy grass in front of Windemere. And that was just the beginning. He’d learned everything worth learning here, how to catch and scale and gut a fish, how to hold an animal living or dead, and flint a fire and move quietly through the woods. How to listen. How to remember everything that mattered so he could keep it with him and use it when he needed to.

This place had never once let him down, but he felt slightly outside of it tonight. Tomorrow, at four o’clock in the afternoon, he and Hadley would be married in the Methodist church on Lake Street. He felt a surge of panic about it, as if he were a fish thrashing in a taut net, fighting it instinctively. It wasn’t Hadley’s fault. Getting married had been all his idea, but he hadn’t told her how very afraid of it he was. He seemed to need to force his way through it anyway, as he did with everything that scared him terribly. He was afraid of marriage and he was afraid of being alone, too.

Rising up from the cool bottom of the lake on the night before his wedding, he found it hard not to turn away from Hadley or grow confused. He loved her. She didn’t scare him like Kate did or challenge him to touch her with green eyes in the dark, saying, “Go on then, what are you afraid of, Wemedge?” With Hadley, things felt right almost all of the time. She was good and strong and true, and he could count on her. They had as good a shot at making it as anyone did, but what if marriage didn’t solve anything and didn’t save anyone even a little bit? What then?

Now that he was on the surface, he could hear Dutch and Luman again, talking of stupid things, not understanding anything at all. The water felt flat and cool against his skin, holding him and letting him go at the same time. He looked up into the black whorl of the sky and took a single deep breath into his lungs, and then he kicked hard for the dock.