Distortions

Vermont

Noel is in our living room shaking his head. He refused my offer and then David’s offer of a drink, but he has had three glasses of water. It is absurd to wonder at such a time when he will get up to go to the bathroom, but I do. I would like to see Noel move; he seems so rigid that I forget to sympathize, forget that he is a real person. “That’s not what I want,” he said to David when David began sympathizing. Absurd, at such a time, to ask what he does want. I can’t remember how it came about that David started bringing glasses of water.

Noel’s wife, Susan, has told him that she’s been seeing John Stillerman. We live on the first floor, Noel and Susan on the second, John on the eleventh. Interesting that John, on the eleventh, should steal Susan from the second floor. John proposes that they just rearrange — that Susan moved up to the eleventh, into the apartment John’s wife only recently left, that they just … John’s wife had a mastectomy last fall, and in the elevator she told Susan that if she was losing what she didn’t want to lose, she might as well lose what she did want to lose. She lost John — left him the way popcorn flies out of the bag on the roller coaster. She is living somewhere in the city, but John doesn’t know where. John is a museum curator, and last month, after John’s picture appeared in a newsmagazine, showing him standing in front of an empty space where a stolen canvas had hung, he got a one-word note from his wife: “Good.” He showed the note to David in the elevator. “It was tucked in the back of his wallet — the way all my friends used to carry rubbers in high school,” David told me.

“Did you guys know?” Noel asks. A difficult one; of course we didn’t know, but naturally we guessed. Is Noel able to handle such semantics? David answers vaguely. Noel shakes his head vaguely, accepting David’s vague answer. What else will he accept? The move upstairs? For now, another glass of water.

David gives Noel a sweater, hoping, no doubt, to stop his shivering. Noel pulls on the sweater over pajamas patterned with small gray fish. David brings him a raincoat, too. A long white scarf hangs from the pocket Noel swishes it back and forth listlessly. He gets up and goes to the bathroom.

“Why did she have to tell him when he was in his pajamas?” David whispers.

Noel comes back, looks out the window. “I don’t know why I didn’t know. I can tell you guys knew.”

Noel goes to our front door, opens it, and wanders off down the hallway.

“If he had stayed any longer, he would have said, ‘Jeepers,’” David says.

David looks at his watch and sighs. Usually he opens Beth’s door on his way to bed, and tiptoes in to admire her. Beth is our daughter. She is five. Some nights, David even leaves a note in her slippers, saying that he loves her. But tonight he’s depressed. I follow him into the bedroom, undress, and get into bed. David looks at me sadly, lies down next to me, turns off the light. I want to say something but don’t know what to say. I could say, “One of us should have gone with Noel. Do you know your socks are still on? You’re going to do to me what Susan did to Noel, aren’t you?”

“Did you see his poor miserable pajamas?” David whispers finally. He throws back the covers and gets up and goes back to the living room. I follow, half asleep. David sits in the chair, puts his arms on the armrests, presses his neck against the back of the chair, and moves his feet together. “Zzzz,” he says, and his head falls forward.

Back in bed, I lie awake, remembering a day David and I spent in the park last August. David was sitting on the swing next to me, scraping the toes of his tennis shoes in the loose dirt.

“Don’t you want to swing?” I said. We had been playing tennis. He had beaten me every game. He always beats me at everything — precision parking, three-dimensional ticktacktoe, soufflés. His soufflés rise as beautifully curved as the moon.

“I don’t know how to swing,” he said.

I tried to teach him, but he couldn’t get his legs to move right. He stood the way I told him, with the board against his behind, gave a little jump to get on, but then he couldn’t synchronize his legs. “Pump!” I called, but it didn’t mean anything. I might as well have said, “Juggle dishes.” I still find it hard to believe there’s anything I can do that he can’t do.

He got off the swing. “Why do you act like everything is a goddamn contest?” he said, and walked away.

“Because we’re always having contests and you always win!” I shouted.

I was still waiting by the swings when he showed up half an hour later.

“Do you consider it a contest when we go scuba diving?” he said.

He had me. It was stupid of me last summer to say how he always snatched the best shells, even when they were closer to me. That made him laugh. He had chased me into a corner, then laughed at me.

I lie in bed now, hating him for that. But don’t leave me, I think — don’t do what Noel’s wife did. I reach across the bed and gently take hold of a little wrinkle in his pajama top. I don’t know if I want to yank his pajamas — do something violent — or smooth them. Confused, I take my hand away and turn on the light. David rolls over, throws his arm over his face, groans. I stare at him. In a second he will lower his arm and demand an explanation. Trapped again. I get up and put on my slippers.

“I’m going to get a drink of water,” I whisper apologetically.

Later in the month, it happens. I’m sitting on a cushion on the floor, with newspapers spread in front of me, repotting plants. I’m just moving the purple passion plant to a larger pot when David comes in. It is late in the afternoon — late enough to be dark outside. David has been out with Beth. Before the two of them went out, Beth, confused by the sight of soil indoors, crouched down beside me to ask, “Are there ants, Mommy?” I laughed. David never approved of my laughing at her. Later, that will be something he’ll mention in court, hoping to get custody: I laugh at her. And when that doesn’t work, he’ll tell the judge what I said about his snatching all the best seashells.

David comes in, coat still buttoned, blue silk scarf still tied (a Christmas present from Noel, with many apologies for losing the white one), sits on the floor, and says that he’s decided to leave. He is speaking very reasonably and quietly. That alarms me. It crosses my mind that he’s mad. And Beth isn’t with him. He has killed her!

No, no, of course not. I’m mad. Beth is upstairs in her friend’s apartment. He ran into Beth’s friend and her mother coming into the building. He asked if Beth could stay in their apartment for a few minutes. I’m not convinced: What friend? I’m foolish to feel reassured as soon as he names one — Louisa. I feel nothing but relief. It might be more accurate to say that I feel nothing. I would have felt pain if she were dead, but David says she isn’t, so I feel nothing. I reach out and begin stroking the plant’s leaves. Soft leaves, sharp points. The plant I’m repotting is a cutting from Noel’s big plant that hangs in a silver ice bucket in his window (a wedding gift that he and Susan had never used). I helped him put it in the ice bucket. “What are you going to do with the top?” I asked. He put it on his head and danced around.

“I had an uncle who got drunk and danced with a lampshade on his head,” Noel said. “That’s an old joke, but how many people have actually seen a man dance with a lampshade on his head? My uncle did it every New Year’s Eve.”

“What the hell are you smiling about?” David says. “Are you listening to me?”

I nod and start to cry. It will be a long time before I realize that David makes me sad and Noel makes me happy.

Noel sympathizes with me. He tells me that David is a fool; he is better off without Susan, and I will be better off without David. Noel calls or visits me in my new apartment almost every night. Last night he suggested that I get a babysitter for tonight, so he could take me to dinner. He tries very hard to make me happy. He brings expensive wine when we eat in my apartment and offers to buy it in restaurants when we eat out. Beth prefers it when we eat in; that way, she can have both Noel and the toy that Noel inevitably brings. Her favorite toy, so far, is a handsome red tugboat pulling three barges, attached to one another by string. Noel bends over, almost doubled in half, to move them across the rug, whistling and calling orders to the imaginary crew. He does not just bring gifts to Beth and me. He has bought himself a new car, and pretends that this is for Beth and me. (“Comfortable seats?” he asks me. “That’s a nice big window back there to wave out of,” he says to Beth.) It is silly to pretend that he got the car for the three of us. And if he did, why was he too cheap to have a radio installed, when he knows I love music? Not only that but he’s bowlegged. I am ashamed of myself for thinking bad things about Noel. He tries so hard to keep us cheerful. He can’t help the odd angle of his thighs. Feeling sorry for him, I decided that a cheap dinner was good enough for tonight. I said that I wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant.

At the restaurant I eat shrimp in black bean sauce and drink a Heineken’s and think that I’ve never tasted anything so delicious. The waiter brings two fortune cookies. We open them; the fortunes make no sense. Noel summons the waiter for the bill. With it come more fortune cookies — four this time. They are no good, either: talk of travel and money. Noel says, “What bloody rot.” He is wearing a gray vest and a white shirt. I peek around the table without his noticing and see that he’s wearing gray wool slacks. Lately it has been very important for me to be able to see everything. Whenever Noel pulls the boats out of sight, into another room, I move as quickly as Beth to watch what’s going on.

Standing behind Noel at the cash register, I see that it has started to rain — a mixture of rain and snow.

“You know how you can tell a Chinese restaurant from any other?” Noel asks, pushing open the door. “Even when it’s raining, the cats still run for the street.”

I shake my head in disgust.

Noel stretches the skin at the corners of his eyes. “Sorry for honorable joke,” he says.

We run for the car. He grabs the belt of my coat, catches me, and half lifts me with one arm, running along with me dangling at his side, giggling. Our wool coats stink. He opens my car door, runs around, and pulls his open. He’s done it again; he has made me laugh.

We start home.

We are in heavy traffic, and Noel drives very slowly, protecting his new car.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“Thirty-six,” Noel says.

“I’m twenty-seven,” I say.

“So what?” he says. He says it pleasantly.

“I just didn’t know how old you were.”

“Mentally, I’m neck and neck with Beth,” he says.

I’m soaking wet, and I want to get home to put on dry clothes. I look at him inching through traffic, and I remember the way his face looked that night he sat in the living room with David and me.

“Rain always puts you in a bad mood, doesn’t it?” he says. He turns the windshield wipers on high. Rubber squeaks against glass.

“I see myself dead in it,” I say.

“You see yourself dead in it?”

Noel does not read novels. He reads Moneysworth, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary. I reprimand myself; there must be fitting ironies in the Wall Street Journal.

“Are you kidding?” Noel says. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself at dinner. It was a good dinner, wasn’t it?”

“I make you nervous, don’t I?” I say.

“No. You don’t make me nervous.”

Rain splashes under the car, drums on the roof. We ride on for blocks and blocks. It is too quiet; I wish there were a radio. The rain on the roof is monotonous, the collar of my coat is wet and cold. At last we are home. Noel parks the car and comes around to my door and opens it. I get out. Noel pulls me close, squeezes me hard. When I was a little girl, I once squeezed a doll to my chest in an antique shop, and when I took it away the eyes had popped off. An unpleasant memory. With my arms around Noel, I feel the cold rain hitting my hands and wrists.

A man running down the sidewalk with a small dog in his arms and a big black umbrella over him calls, “Your lights are on!”

It is almost a year later — Christmas — and we are visiting Noel’s crazy sister, Juliette. After going with Noel for so long, I am considered one of the family. Juliette phones before every occasion, saying, “You’re one of the family. Of course you don’t need an invitation.” I should appreciate it, but she’s always drunk when she calls, and usually she starts to cry and says she wishes Christmas and Thanksgiving didn’t exist. Jeanette, his other sister, is very nice, but she lives in Colorado. Juliette lives in New Jersey. Here we are in Bayonne, New Jersey, coming in through the front door — Noel holding Beth, me carrying a pumpkin pie. I tried to sniff the pie aroma on the way from Noel’s apartment to his sister’s house, but it had no smell. Or else I’m getting another cold. I sucked chewable vitamin C tablets in the car, and now I smell of oranges. Noel’s mother is in the living room, crocheting. Better, at least, than David’s mother, who was always discoursing about Andrew Wyeth. I remember with satisfaction that the last time I saw her I said, “It’s a simple fact that Edward Hopper was better.”

Juliette: long, whitish-blond hair tucked in back of her pink ears, spike-heel shoes that she orders from Frederick’s of Hollywood, dresses that show her cleavage. Noel and I are silently wondering if her husband will be here. At Thanksgiving he showed up just as we were starting dinner, with a black-haired woman who wore a dress with a plunging neckline. Juliette’s breasts faced the black-haired woman’s breasts across the table (tablecloth crocheted by Noel’s mother). Noel doesn’t like me to criticize Juliette. He thinks positively. His other sister is a musician. She has a husband and a weimaraner and two rare birds that live in a birdcage built by her husband. They have a lot of money and they ski. They have adopted a Korean boy. Once, they showed us a film of the Korean boy learning to ski. Wham, wham, wham — every few seconds he was groveling in the snow again.

Juliette is such a liberal that she gives us not only the same bedroom but a bedroom with only a single bed in it. Beth sleeps on the couch.

Wedged beside Noel that night, I say, “This is ridiculous.”

“She means to be nice,” he says. “Where else would we sleep?”

“She could let us have her double bed and she could sleep in here. After all, he’s not coming back, Noel.”

“Shh.”

“Wouldn’t that have been better?”

“What do you care?” Noel says. “You’re nuts about me, right?”

He slides up against me and hugs my back.

“I don’t know how people talk any more,” he says. “I don’t know any of the current lingo. What expression do people use for ‘nuts about’?”

“I don’t know.”

“I just did it again! I said ‘lingo.’ ”

“So what? Who do you want to sound like?”

“The way I talk sounds dated — like an old person.”

“Why are you always worried about being old?”

He snuggles closer. “You didn’t answer before when I said you were nuts about me. That doesn’t mean that you don’t like me, does it?”

“No.”

“You’re big on the one-word answers.”

“I’m big on going to sleep.”

“ ‘Big on.’ See? There must be some expression to replace that now.”

I sit in the car, waiting for Beth to come out of the building where the ballet school is. She has been taking lessons, but they haven’t helped. She still slouches forward and sticks out her neck when she walks. Noel suggests that this might be analyzed psychologically; she sticks her neck out, you see, not only literally but … Noel thinks that Beth is waiting to get it. Beth feels guilty because her mother and father have just been divorced. She thinks that she played some part in it and therefore she deserves to get it. It is worth fifty dollars a month for ballet lessons to disprove Noel’s theory. If it will only work.

I spend the day in the park, thinking over Noel’s suggestion that I move in with him. We would have more money … We are together so much anyway … Or he could move in with me, if those big windows in my place are really so important. I always meet reasonable men.

“But I don’t love you,” I said to Noel. “Don’t you want to live with somebody who loves you?”

“Nobody has ever loved me and nobody ever will,” Noel said. “What have I got to lose?”

I am in the park to think about what I have to lose. Nothing. So why don’t I leave the park, call him at work, say that I have decided it is a very sensible plan?

A chubby little boy wanders by, wearing a short jacket and pants that are slipping down. He is holding a yellow boat. He looks so damned pleased with everything that I think about accosting him and asking, “Should I move in with Noel? Why am I reluctant to do it?” The young have such wisdom — some of the best and worst thinkers have thought so: Wordsworth, the followers of the Guru Maharaj Ji … “Do the meditations, or I will beat you with a stick,” the Guru tells his followers. Tell me the answer, kid, or I will take away your boat.

I sink down onto a bench. Next, Noel will ask me to marry him. He is trying to trap me. Worse, he is not trying to trap me but only wants me to move in so we can save money. He doesn’t care about me. Since no one has ever loved him, he can’t love anybody. Is that even true?

I find a phone booth and stand in front of it, waiting for a woman with a shopping bag to get out. She mouths something I don’t understand. She has lips like a fish; they are painted bright orange. I do not have any lipstick on. I have on a raincoat, pulled over my nightgown, and sandals and Noel’s socks.

“Noel,” I say on the phone when I reach him, “were you serious when you said that no one ever loved you?”

“Jesus, it was embarrassing enough just to admit it,” he says. “Do you have to question me about it?”

“I have to know.”

“Well, I’ve told you about every woman I ever slept with. Which one do you suspect might have loved me?”

I have ruined his day. I hang up, rest my head against the phone. “Me,” I mumble. “I do.” I reach in the raincoat pocket. A Kleenex, two pennies, and a pink rubber spider put there by Beth to scare me. No more dimes. I push open the door. A young woman is standing there waiting for me. “Do you have a few moments?” she says.

“Why?”

“Do you have a moment? What do you think of this?” she says. It is a small stick with the texture of salami. In her other hand she holds a clipboard and a pen.

“I don’t have time,” I say, and walk away. I stop and turn. “What is that, anyway?” I ask.

“Do you have a moment?” she asks.

“No. I just wanted to know what that thing was.”

“A dog treat.”

She is coming after me, clipboard outstretched.

“I don’t have time,” I say, and quickly walk away.

Something hits my back. “Take the time to stick it up your ass,” she says.

I run for a block before I stop and lean on the park wall to rest. If Noel had been there, she wouldn’t have done it. My protector. If I had a dime, I could call back and say, “Oh, Noel, I’ll live with you always if you’ll stay with me so people won’t throw dog treats at me.”

I finger the plastic spider. Maybe Beth put it there to cheer me up. Once, she put a picture of a young, beautiful girl in a bikini on my bedroom wall. I misunderstood, seeing the woman as all that I was not. Beth just thought it was a pretty picture. She didn’t understand why I was so upset.

“Mommy’s just upset because when you put things on the wall with Scotch Tape, the Scotch Tape leaves a mark when you remove it,” Noel told her.

Noel is wonderful. I reach in my pocket, hoping a dime will suddenly appear.

Noel and I go to visit his friends Charles and Sol, in Vermont. Noel has taken time off from work; it is a vacation to celebrate our decision to live together. Now, on the third evening there, we are all crowded around the hearth — Noel and Beth and I, Charles and Sol and the women they live with, Lark and Margaret. We are smoking and listening to Sol’s stereo. The hearth is a big one. It was laid by Sol, made out of slate he took from the side of a hill and bricks he found dumped by the side of the road. There is a mantel that was made by Charles from a section of an old carousel he picked up when a local amusement park closed down; a gargoyle’s head protrudes from one side. Car keys have been draped over the beast’s eyebrows. On top of the mantel there is an L. L. Bean catalogue, Margaret’s hat, roaches and a roach clip, a can of peaches, and an incense burner that holds a small cone in a puddle of lavender ashes.

Noel used to work with Charles in the city. Charles quit when he heard about a big house in Vermont that needed to be fixed up. He was told that he could live in it for a hundred dollars a month, except in January and February, when skiers rented it. The skiers turned out to be nice people who didn’t want to see anyone displaced. They suggested that the four stay on in the house, and they did, sleeping in a side room that Charles and Sol fixed up. Just now, the rest of the house is empty; it has been raining a lot, ruining the skiing.

Sol has put up some pictures he framed — old advertisements he found in a box in the attic (after Charles repaired the attic stairs). I study the pictures now, in the firelight. The Butter Lady — a healthy coquette with pearly skin and a mildewed bottom lip — extends a hand offering a package of butter. On the wall across from her, a man with oil-slick black hair holds a shoe that is the same color as his hair.

“When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Eastertime, too,” Dylan sings.

Margaret says to Beth, “Do you want to come take a bath with me?”

Beth is shy. The first night we were here, she covered her eyes when Sol walked naked from the bathroom to the bedroom.

“I don’t have to take a bath while I’m here, do I?” she says to me.

“Where did you get that idea?”

“Why do I have to take a bath?”

But she decides to go with Margaret, and runs after her and grabs on to her wool sash. Margaret blows on the incense stick she has just lit, and fans it in the air, and Beth, enchanted, follows her out of the room. She already feels at ease in the house, and she likes us all and wanders off with anyone gladly, even though she’s usually shy. Yesterday, Sol showed her how to punch down the bread before putting it on the baking sheet to rise once more. He let her smear butter over the loaves with her fingers and then sprinkle cornmeal on the top.

Sol teaches at the state university. He is a poet, and he has been hired to teach a course in the modern novel. “Oh, well,” he is saying now. “If I weren’t a queer and I’d gone into the Army, I guess they would have made me a cook. That’s usually what they do, isn’t it?”

“Don’t ask me,” Charles says. “I’m queer, too.” This seems to be an old routine.

Noel is admiring the picture frames. “This is such a beautiful place,” he says. “I’d love to live here for good.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Sol says. “With a lot of fairies?”

Sol is reading a student’s paper. “This student says, ‘Humbert is just like a million other Americans,’” he says.

“Humbert?” Noel says.

“You know — that guy who ran against Nixon.”

“Come on,” Noel says. “I know it’s from some novel.”

“Lolita,” Lark says, all on the intake. She passes the joint to me.

“Why don’t you quit that job?” Lark says. “You hate it.”

“I can’t be unemployed,” Sol says. “I’m a faggot and a poet. I’ve already got two strikes against me.” He puffs twice on the roach, lets it slip out of the clip to the hearth. “And a drug abuser,” he says. “I’m as good as done for.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, dear,” Charles says, putting his hand gently on Sol’s shoulder. Sol jumps. Charles and Noel laugh.

It is time for dinner — moussaka, and bread, and wine that Noel brought.

“What’s moussaka?” Beth asks. Her skin shines, and her hair has dried in small narrow ridges where Margaret combed it.

“Made with mice,” Sol says.

Beth looks at Noel. Lately, she checks things out with him. He shakes his head no. Actually, she is not a dumb child; she probably looked at Noel because she knows it makes him happy.

Beth has her own room — the smallest bedroom, with a fur rug on the floor and a quilt to sleep under. As I talk to Lark after dinner, I hear Noel reading to Beth: “The Trout Fishing Diary of Alonso Hagen.” Soon Beth is giggling.

I sit in Noel’s lap, looking out the window at the fields, white and flat, and the mountains — a blur that I know is mountains. The radiator under the window makes the glass foggy. Noel leans forward to wipe it with a handkerchief. We are in winter now. We were going to leave Vermont after a week — then two, now three. Noel’s hair is getting long. Beth has missed a month of school. What will the Board of Education do to me? “What do you think they’re going to do?” Noel says. “Come after us with guns?”

Noel has just finished confiding in me another horrendous or mortifying thing he would never, never tell anyone and that I must swear not to repeat. The story is about something that happened when he was eighteen. There was a friend of his mother’s whom he threatened to strangle if she didn’t let him sleep with her. She let him. As soon as it was over, he was terrified that she would tell someone, and he threatened to strangle her if she did. But he realized that as soon as he left she could talk, and that he could be arrested, and he got so upset that he broke down and ran back to the bed where they had been, pulled the covers over his head, and shook and cried. Later, the woman told his mother that Noel seemed to be studying too hard at Princeton — perhaps he needed some time off. A second story was about how he tried to kill himself when his wife left him. The truth was that he couldn’t give David his scarf back because it was stretched from being knotted so many times. But he had been too chicken to hang himself and he had swallowed a bottle of drugstore sleeping pills instead. Then he got frightened and went outside and hailed a cab. Another couple, huddled together in the wind, told him that they had claimed the cab first. The same couple was in the waiting room of the hospital when he came to.

“The poor guy put his card next to my hand on the stretcher,” Noel says, shaking his head so hard that his beard scrapes my cheek. “He was a plumber. Eliot Raye. And his wife, Flora.”

A warm afternoon. “Noel!” Beth cries, running across the soggy lawn toward him, her hand extended like a fisherman with his catch. But there’s nothing in her hand — only a little spot of blood on the palm. Eventually he gets the story out of her: she fell. He will bandage it. He is squatting, his arm folding her close like some giant bird. A heron? An eagle? Will he take my child and fly away? They walk toward the house, his hand pressing Beth’s head against his leg.

We are back in the city. Beth is asleep in the room that was once Noel’s study. I am curled up in Noel’s lap. He has just asked to hear the story of Michael again.

“Why do you want to hear that?” I ask.

Noel is fascinated by Michael, who pushed his furniture into the hall and threw his small possessions out the window into the back yard and then put up four large, connecting tents in his apartment. There was a hot plate in there, cans of Franco-American spaghetti, bottles of good wine, a flashlight for when it got dark …

Noel urges me to remember more details. What else was in the tent?

A rug, but that just happened to be on the floor. For some reason, he didn’t throw the rug out the window. And there was a sleeping bag …

What else?

Comic books. I don’t remember which ones. A lemon meringue pie. I remember how disgusting that was after two days, with the sugar oozing out of the meringue. A bottle of Seconal. There was a drinking glass, a container of warm juice … I don’t remember.

We used to make love in the tent. I’d go over to see him, open the front door, and crawl in. That summer he collapsed the tents, threw them in his car, and left for Maine.

“Go on,” Noel says.

I shrug. I’ve told this story twice before, and this is always my stopping place.

“That’s it,” I say to Noel.

He continues to wait expectantly, just as he did the two other times he heard the story.

One evening, we get a phone call from Lark. There is a house near them for sale — only thirty thousand dollars. What Noel can’t fix, Charles and Sol can help with. There are ten acres of land, a waterfall. Noel is wild to move there. But what are we going to do for money, I ask him. He says we’ll worry about that in a year or so, when we run out. But we haven’t even seen the place, I point out. But this is a fabulous find, he says. We’ll go see it this weekend. Noel has Beth so excited that she wants to start school in Vermont on Monday, not come back to the city at all. We will just go to the house right this minute and live there forever.

But does he know how to do the wiring? Is he sure it can be wired?

“Don’t you have any faith in me?” he says. “David always thought I was a chump, didn’t he?”

“I’m only asking whether you can do such complicated things.”

My lack of faith in Noel has made him unhappy. He leaves the room without answering. He probably remembers — and knows that I remember — the night he asked David if he could see what was wrong with the socket of his floor lamp. David came back to our apartment laughing. “The plug had come out of the outlet,” he said.

In early April, David comes to visit us in Vermont for the weekend with his girlfriend, Patty. She wears blue jeans, and has kohl around her eyes. She is twenty years old. Her clogs echo loudly on the bare floorboards. She seems to feel awkward here. David seems not to feel awkward, although he looked surprised when Beth called him David. She led him through the woods, running ahead of Noel and me, to show him the waterfall. When she got too far ahead, I called her back, afraid, for some reason, that she might die. If I lost sight of her, she might die. I suppose I had always thought that if David and I spent time together again it would be over the hospital bed of our dying daughter — something like that.

Patty has trouble walking in the woods; the clogs flop off her feet in the brush. I tried to give her a pair of my sneakers, but she wears size 8½ and I am a 7. Another thing to make her feel awkward.

David breathes in dramatically. “Quite a change from the high rise we used to live in,” he says to Noel.

Calculated to make us feel rotten?

“You used to live in a high rise?” Patty asks.

He must have just met her. She pays careful attention to everything he says, watches with interest when he snaps off a twig and breaks it in little pieces. She is having trouble keeping up. David finally notices her difficulty in keeping up with us, and takes her hand. They’re city people; they don’t even have hiking boots.

“It seems as if that was in another life,” David says. He snaps off a small branch and flicks one end of it against his thumb.

“There’s somebody who says that every time we sleep we die; we come back another person, to another life,” Patty says.

“Kafka as realist,” Noel says.

Noel has been reading all winter. He has read Brautigan, a lot of Borges, and has gone from Dante to García Márquez to Hilma Wolitzer to Kafka. Sometimes I ask him why he is going about it this way. He had me make him a list — this writer before that one, which poems are early, which late, which famous. Well, it doesn’t matter. Noel is happy in Vermont. Being in Vermont means that he can do what he wants to do. Freedom, you know. Why should I make fun of it? He loves his books, loves roaming around in the woods outside the house, and he buys more birdseed than all the birds in the North could eat. He took a Polaroid picture of our salt lick for the deer when he put it in, and admired both the salt lick (“They’ve been here!”) and his picture. Inside the house there are Polaroids of the woods, the waterfall, some rabbits-he tacks them up with pride, the way Beth hangs up the pictures she draws in school. “You know,” Noel said to me one night, “when Gatsby is talking to Nick Carraway and he says, ‘In any case, it was just personal’—what does that mean?”

“When did you read Gatsby?” I asked.

“Last night, in the bathtub.”

As we turn to walk back, Noel points out the astonishing number of squirrels in the trees around us. By David’s expression, he thinks Noel is pathetic.

I look at Noel. He is taller than David but more stooped; thinner than David, but his slouch disguises it. Noel has big hands and feet and a sharp nose. His scarf is gray, with frayed edges. David’s is bright red, just bought. Poor Noel. When David called to say he and Patty were coming for a visit, Noel never thought of saying no. And he asked me how he could compete with David. He thought David was coming to his house to win me away. After he reads more literature he’ll realize that is too easy. There will have to be complexities. The complexities will protect him forever. Hours after David’s call, he said (to himself, really — not to me) that David was bringing a woman with him. Surely that meant he wouldn’t try anything.

Charles and Margaret come over just as we are finishing dinner, bringing a mattress we are borrowing for David and Patty to sleep on. They are both stoned, and are dragging the mattress on the ground, which is white with a late snow. They are too stoned to hoist it.

“Eventide,” Charles says. A circular black barrette holds his hair out of his face. Margaret lost her hat to Lark some time ago and never got around to borrowing another one. Her hair is dusted with snow. “We have to go,” Charles says, weighing her hair in his hands, “before the snow woman melts.”

Sitting at the kitchen table late that night, I turn to David. “How are you doing?” I whisper.

“A lot of things haven’t been going the way I figured,” he whispers.

I nod. We are drinking white wine and eating cheddar-cheese soup. The soup is scalding. Clouds of steam rise from the bowl, and I keep my face away from it, worrying that the steam will make my eyes water, and that David will misinterpret.

“Not really things. People,” David whispers, bobbing an ice cube up and down in his wineglass with his index finger.

“What people?”

“It’s better not to talk about it. They’re not really people you know.”

That hurts, and he knew it would hurt. But climbing the stairs to go to bed I realize that, in spite of that, it’s a very reasonable approach.

Tonight, as I do most nights, I sleep with long johns under my nightgown. I roll over on top of Noel for more warmth and lie there, as he has said, like a dead man, like a man in the Wild West, gunned down in the dirt. Noel jokes about this. “Pow, pow,” he whispers sleepily as I lower myself on him. “Poor critter’s deader ’n a doornail.” I lie there warming myself. What does he want with me?

“What do you want for your birthday?” I ask.

He recites a little list of things he wants. He whispers: a bookcase, an aquarium, a blender to make milkshakes in.

“That sounds like what a ten-year-old would want,” I say.

He is quiet too long; I have hurt his feelings.

“Not the bookcase,” he says finally.

I am falling asleep. It’s not fair to fall asleep on top of him. He doesn’t have the heart to wake me and has to lie there with me sprawled on top of him until I fall off. Move, I tell myself, but I don’t.

“Do you remember this afternoon, when Patty and I sat on the rock to wait for you and David and Beth?”

I remember. We were on top of the hill, Beth pulling David by his hand, David not very interested in what she was going to show him, Beth ignoring his lack of interest and pulling him along. I ran to catch up, because she was pulling him so hard, and I caught Beth’s free arm and hung on, so that we formed a chain.

“I knew I’d seen that before,” Noel says. “I just realized where — when the actor wakes up after the storm and sees Death leading those people winding across the hilltop in The Seventh Seal.”

Six years ago. Seven. David and I were in the Village, in the winter, looking in a bookstore window. Tires began to squeal, and we turned around and were staring straight at a car, a ratty old blue car that had lifted a woman from the street into the air. The fall took much too long; she fell the way snow drifts — the big flakes that float down, no hurry at all. By the time she hit, though, David had pushed my face against his coat, and while everyone was screaming — it seemed as if a whole chorus had suddenly assembled to scream — he had his arms around my shoulders, pressing me so close that I could hardly breathe and saying, “If anything happened to you … If anything happened to you …”

When they leave, it is a clear, cold day. I give Patty a paper bag with half a bottle of wine, two sandwiches, and some peanuts to eat on the way back. The wine is probably not a good idea; David had three glasses of vodka and orange juice for breakfast. He began telling jokes to Noel — dogs in bars outsmarting their owners, constipated whores, talking fleas. David does not like Noel; Noel does not know what to make of David.

Now David rolls down the car window. Last-minute news. He tells me that his sister has been staying in his apartment. She aborted herself and has been very sick. “Abortions are legal,” David says. “Why did she do that?” I ask how long ago it happened. A month ago, he says. His hands drum on the steering wheel. Last week, Beth got a box of wooden whistles carved in the shape of peasants from David’s sister. Noel opened the kitchen window and blew softly to some birds on the feeder. They all flew away.

Patty leans across David. “There are so many animals here, even in the winter,” she says. “Don’t they hibernate any more?”

She is making nervous, polite conversation. She wants to leave. Noel walks away from me to Patty’s side of the car, and tells her about the deer who come right up to the house. Beth is sitting on Noel’s shoulders. Not wanting to talk to David, I wave at her stupidly. She waves back.

David looks at me out the window. I must look as stiff as one of those wooden whistles, all carved out of one piece, in my old blue ski jacket and blue wool hat pulled down to my eyes and my baggy jeans.

“Ciao,” David says. “Thanks.”

“Yes,” Patty says. “It was nice of you to do this.” She holds up the bag.

It’s a steep driveway, and rocky. David backs down cautiously — the way someone pulls a zipper after it’s been caught. We wave, they disappear. That was easy.