Chapter 20
Susan and I lay in bed in her house on Thanksgiving morning. It was sunny outside the window, and it looked like it wouldn't be cold. I looked at the bedside clock. 7:35. No sound. The room was whitewashed and furnished with colonial pine, and the full flood of sunlight made it almost dazzling in its simple brightness.
Susan said; "You think it's too early to open the champagne?"
"We could mix it with orange juice and argue for vitamins," I said.
Susan took my hand under the covers and we lay quietly on our backs amongst the flowered sheets and pillows. "What does Hawk do on Thanksgiving?" Susan said.
"I have no idea," I said. "Probably has honey-roasted pheasant served to him by an Abyssinian maiden with a dulcimer." "You are peculiar," Susan said. "You trust Hawk with your life or mine. You expect him to risk his life for you -I know you'd risk yours for him-and you don't even know what he does on Thanksgiving. Did you think about inviting him out for dinner?"
"Hawk?" I said.
"Yes." "Have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner?"
"Certainly. Doesn't he have holidays?"
"Suze," I said. "You just don't have Hawk for Thanksgiving dinner."
"Why not?"
"Well, it's…" I tried to think of the right way to say it. Hawk and I both knew and we knew without having to say it or even think it. "You know how in medieval landscape painting the artists would often include an allegorical representation of death to remind us that it is always present and imminent?"
She nodded.
"That's like inviting Hawk to Thanksgiving dinner. He'd be the figure in the landscape, and that would compromise him. Hawk would not want you to invite him."
"That doesn't make any sense," Susan said.
"It would to Hawk," I said.
Susan was quiet, her hand in mine, our bodies close together. Then she said, "It's where you lose me, this arcane male thing. It's like a set of rituals from a religion that no longer exists, the rules of a kingdom that disappeared before memory. It can't be questioned or explained, it simply is-like gravity or inertia."
"I know," I said.
"I realize it's a source of strength for you," she said, and turned her head from profile to full face, lying close to mine on the pillow, "but you pay a high price for it too, and so does Hawk."
"Hawk higher than I do," I said.
"Because of me?"
"Yes. I have you. He has no one."
"He has you," she said.
I said, "He and I are part of the same cold place. You aren't. You're the source of warmth. Hawk has none. You're what makes me different from Hawk."
"How different?" she said. Close to me her eyes were enormous.
"I'm here for Thanksgiving dinner," I said.
"Yes," she said. "You are. Let's get to it."
I said nothing about Mitchell Poitras and Amy Gurwitz and the Department of Education. It was just Susan and me today, and I would wait till tomorrow for anything else.
Susan started the coffee and I built a large fire in the den. We squeezed a small pitcher of orange juice and shared it while .I mixed up some johnnycake batter and dropped spoonfuls of it onto the hot griddle. Johnnycake is made with white cornmeal and is somewhere between cornmeal mush and a pancake. It may be an acquired taste, but Suze and I were nothing on a holiday if not authentic. We ate the johnnycake with butter and maple syrup in front of the fire in the den and drank coffee.
"Pilgrims," I said.
"Speak for yourself, John," she said.
"Did you know that Priscilla Alden's maiden name was Mullins?" I said. "Incredibly, no," Susan said.
"Or that a guy writing at the time referred to Miles Standish as Captain Shrimp?"
"Much like yourself," Susan said, and grinned at me that fallen-angel grin-the one that Eve must have grinned at Adam.
"Ah," I said, "how quickly they forget."
The fire settled more densely, the logs feeding each other's intensity like mutual enemies. The newspaper came. Susan got both the Globe and the Herald- American. We took turns reading through them, Susan much more quickly than I. We fueled the fire once or twice and returned to the couch in front of it, feet up on the old sea chest that Susan used as a coffee table, spines bent, sprawled on the cushions with our thighs touching in warm torpor. Susan went to shower. I asked her not to use all the hot water. She said she wouldn't. -I read the sports page. Already, barely a month after the World Series, there was talk of a baseball strike. There were ten contract renegotiations. The Red Sox had decided not to pay anyone, and everyone was threatening to be a free agent. It read like The Wall Street Journal. If 1 were a player, would I want six trillion dollars? Yes. I guessed I would. Did 1 find it interesting? No, I did not. Has the game changed? Say it ain't so, Joe.
Susan appeared in half an hour wearing jeans no tighter than the skin on a grape and a white oxford shirt with a button-down collar and cowboy boots, smelling of perfume and shampoo and soap. I inhaled. "Sensual," I said, "but not too far from innocence."
"Far enough," Susan said. I went to shower and shave and put on clean clothes. When I came back we went to the kitchen and began Thanksgiving dinner. Johnny Hartman was on the stereo. The sun was halfway to zenith and made the tile kitchen glisten. The cooking steamed the windows a bit, filtering the sun slightly and making the brilliance of the kitchen a bit muted as we progressed. At noon Susan brought out a bottle of Dom Pdrignon 1971, which we shared as we cooked. The barrel-bodied Lab appeared at the back door and scratched to come in. Susan put down a bowl of water and she drank noisily and long. When she finished she looked expectantly at Susan, her ears a little forward, her tail in a slow scimitar wag. Susan took a round dog biscuit from a box in the cupboard and gave it to the Lab.
"Just one," she said. "You're on a diet," The dog took the biscuit to the other side of the kitchen, wolfed it down, and lay down with a heavy exhalation and a solid thump. She lay on her side against the back door with her feet toward us and her tongue out and appeared to go to sleep. "Whose dog is that?" I said.
"People down the street."
By two o'clock dinner was nearly done, and Susan went to set the table while I did the last few tricks, and at 2:30 we sat down to dinner in Susan's dining room with a white linen tablecloth and pink linen napkins and champagne in a silver cooler. It was Susan's good English china and the silver she'd gotten for a wedding present from her ex-mother-in-law. The tall tulip-shaped champagne glasses I had bought her. I'd bought four, but mostly we used just two and drank champagne alone. Sonny Rollins was spinning softly in the background. We didn't insist on complete authenticity.
We began by eating hot pumpkin soup and then some cold asparagus with green herb mayonnaise on a bed of red lettuce. After that we each had half a pheasant with raspberry vinegar sauce and a kind of salon pilaf that Susan made from white and wild rice with pignolia nuts. For dessert we had sour cherry cobbler with Vermont cheddar cheese, and after we had finished with the last of the champagne and I had embarrassed myself with a second serving, we took coffee and Grand Marnier into the den and drank it in a near stupor on the couch before the' dwindling fire with the football game on the televi- sion. Susan hated football, so we turned the sound off. She had three back issues of The New Yorker and read a series on psychoanalysis that had run there, or pretended to, while I watched the Lions and the Packers, or pretended to. With a last desperate effort I got some more wood on the fire and then settled back on the couch. In fifteen minutes Susan's head rested against my shoulder, her mouth slightly open and her breath shifting occasionally into a faint snore. Before halftime my chin was against my chest and my cheek was pressed against the top of Susan's head.
It was dark when we woke up. The fire barely shimmered on the hearth. A newscast was progressing silently on the TV screen and Thanksgiving Day was nearly past. They ran the local college and high school football results on a crawl, and as the mesmerizing sequence went on it was like a rehearsal of small-town Massachusetts: clean-lined white buildings around a common, square brick schools, cheerleaders with pony- tails and chunky thighs, and parents in pride and contentment watching the children play. "Nice day," Susan murmured. "For some," I said. "Not for most?" "Pretty to think so," I said.