Among the Missing (24 page)

But he didn’t. It seemed too complicated, he thought, and his pathways through his own memory seemed as complex and delicate as the holes earthworms and other small insects dug through the soil of a garden. When you put a shovel to the skin of the ground and turned over the dirt, all those tunnels fell
apart. The worms and bugs crashed into the sunlight, dazed and wriggling, and the winding ways of their secret cities were lost forever.

It was a corny metaphor, he knew, but it came to him nevertheless as he made a garden for her out behind her house. He turned over the earth, spading up a weedy patch behind her house and mixing it with manure, planting tomatoes and basil and sunflowers and squash and hollyhocks, while she sat on the back porch in shorts and sunglasses, reading and occasionally looking up to watch him. She loved him at such times, he thought, when he was simple with physical work, she loved him more than she did when he talked and offered opinions.

“I don’t feel a bit sorry for Virginia Woolf,” he had told her, once. “I mean, don’t you think that most men are just like ‘Shakespeare’s Sister,’ too? You know? Do you think guys out here get the privilege of education more than girls do? Not really. Look at Woolf—she was rich, wasn’t she? And a huge snob, too. I’d rather be her than some butler on her estate. Do you think her male servants had any better chance than she did?”

Dorrie hadn’t been very patient with this argument—“provincial,” she’d called it—and had pointed out various working-class men who
had
overcome their situations, while there were almost no examples of working-class women who had gone on to achieve literary fame. “I don’t think you have a broad enough view to make a legitimate case,” she had said. She had given him some books to read—but she hadn’t looked at him in the way she did when he was planting the garden, when she had run her smooth hands over the blisters on his palms, when she had softly put her tongue to his fingers, her nose drawing in breath as it passed across his skin. They’d taken off their clothes in the
patch of lawn just beyond the garden he’d dug, and she’d pressed her breasts against his chest as he lay beneath her, her lips on his, her hand finding the zipper of his pants, his thoughts falling apart like a shovelful of dirt.

Later, when the tomatoes and squash were beginning to flower, they were side by side in bed, and she asked him about his mother.

“You don’t ever talk to her?” Dorrie said.

“Not really,” he said. “I sent her a card on Mother’s Day.”

“But why?” Dorrie said. She reclined back in the darkness, her soft thigh moving away from his, the musky, powdery smell of her still in his nostrils. “Do you have a problem with your mother?” She was silent for a moment, then said, as if joking: “Is that what this is all about?”

“No,” he said, and shifted awkwardly in the bed, passing his hand over his quieting penis, pushing it down. He thought then to tell Dorrie about his first marriage, about the baby. He couldn’t tell her about his mother’s blankness—about the way he’d come into the house, drunk, on the night of the funeral, to find his mother sitting on the couch, watching television and smoking pot. She was watching an old horror movie in which Charlton Heston ran through the future, screaming. “Soylent Green is people!” he cried, and Trent’s mother looked up, glazed, when Trent walked in. She stared at him for a long time. They had nothing to say to one another.

“What are you watching?” Trent said, quietly, and his mother shrugged.

“Nothing interesting,” she said, and they both grew awkwardly silent. He pressed his palm against the wall to steady himself. He thought that she might be comforting to him, but
even now, she wasn’t. She didn’t think that he felt anything, or at least that’s how she acted. He thought of things that she’d said about him—that he liked to manipulate people, that he was sneaky, cold-blooded. “As long as you get what you want, you’re happy,” she’d said to him once. “No matter about anyone else.” She didn’t say that after the baby died, but he felt that she thought it, and he put his hand over his mouth.

“Mom,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

But she didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes on the television, even though it was now just a commercial for used cars.

“What do you have to be sorry about?” she said. “Nobody’s blaming you for anything.” And then she was quiet, closing her eyes, clasping her bare feet in her hands. She watched as he tottered along the edge of the living room, sipping from a bottle of schnapps. “Go to bed,” she said. There was a poster of a wolf behind the couch she was sitting on, a wolf with its muzzle upraised howling at a big blue rising moon, and Trent stared at the poster stupidly as his mother’s eyes examined him. She lifted a bong from the coffee table and drew smoke from it.

She didn’t want him there anymore, he thought, hadn’t wanted him around for a long time—they had been living for a long time like roommates or cousins, sharing the same space but not really thinking much of it, beyond day-to-day bickering or watching television together. They were mother and son, but they didn’t love each other, really—not nearly as much as he’d loved Brooke, or his baby, or later Dorrie herself, who slept, breathing thickly into the dark. The steady, solid shadow of her body was nearby and warm when he pressed his hand against it.

“I’ll have to meet her someday, your mother,” Dorrie had
said, after his vague answers had bored her into sleepiness. “You don’t have anything to hide, do you?” Dorrie murmured.

“Yes,” Trent whispered. But Dorrie didn’t answer. She lolled against him, and if his answer registered at all, she didn’t want to know the rest.

“I was married before, you know,” Trent said softly.

“Oh, please,” Dorrie mumbled. “When was that? When you were ten?”

And he was silent. He waited for her to ask again, but she was already asleep.

He thought of all this again as Dorrie came out onto the back porch, into the crisp September evening, to find him passing a marijuana cigarette to David Bender. The garden he had planted was going to seed, dying: A few old cherry tomatoes hung on the vine, and the hollyhock flowers had closed into hard seed-pods, and the weeds near the fence had begun to grow stiff and yellow.

“Oh,” she said, her face tightening as David Bender tried to hide the joint in his cupped hands. She gazed at them both for a moment, and Trent wished he had told her. He wished that she knew that he’d gotten the marijuana, was getting her son stoned, for her sake.

“Hey,” she said, and smiled as if she were just another girl at a party. “Hey,” she said. “Are you guys getting high?”

David Bender was the first to break the tableau. He giggled a little, nervously, then brought out the marijuana cigarette that
Trent had given him. The cherry of the joint had gone out, and he dipped his head as he offered it to Dorrie.

“You want some?” he said, and they paused nervously as she took it from him, flicking the lighter David Bender offered. They watched as she drew deeply, holding her breath for a long time before exhaling. David and Trent exchanged glances, feeling embarrassed for their various reasons, and Dorrie coughed delicately, putting a fist to her throat.

“Dorrie,” Trent said, and she raised her hand to silence him.

“What?” she said, and looked at David Bender, who shrugged his shoulders, still grinning uncertainly. “You’re really easily shocked,” she said, turning to Trent. “Marijuana has been popular for several generations now, you know.”

“I know,” Trent said. Her eyes held him, but he didn’t know what she was thinking—whether she was hurt or amused or angry or merely challenging, and he wished there were some word he could say, some button he could push, that would make her expression solidify into something he could understand. “I didn’t mean to exclude you or anything,” he said, and tried to smile at her. “I was just—getting to know David, you know? And I thought …”

“No problem,” she said, and took another drag from the joint. “There’s no problem,” she said, and Trent was so flustered that he got down on his hands and knees and kissed her toes, which were sticking out of a pair of sandals. Then he stood up again, embarrassed; he didn’t smoke pot very often, because it made him prone to do ridiculous things—jokes, he guessed, by which he meant to disarm people. It seemed to work with Dorrie, who stared at him for a long moment with a look somewhere between laughter and bewilderment.

“Wow,” David Bender said, with stoned dispassion. “No one ever kisses
my
feet!”

The bar that Courtney had suggested, The Green Lantern, was on the outskirts of town, and when they walked in, patrons turned to look at them, but they didn’t draw any real attention to themselves. Most of the clientele were what Trent and other bartenders called townies, locals not associated with the college, and Dorrie hesitated for a beat, taking it all in. “I wondered where the Old West was hiding itself,” she said wryly, and Trent felt, for the first time that day, somewhat pleased with himselF.Dorrie seemed mellowed, and David Bender seemed to be having a good time, drifting with a kind of hazy merriment toward a booth. He was glad that he’d taken Courtney’s advice and purchased a small bag of marijuana from her. He felt as if he had gotten a grip on what could have been a bad situation.

“This is wonderful,” David Bender said, and surreptitiously eyed a man with a cowboy hat and a handlebar mustache, and an older countrified couple who were dancing, the stuffed heads of elk and antelope and antlered deer that hung on the walls. Various cattle brands had been burned into the pine wood of the wall by their booth, different simple symbols and combined letters, like rows of hieroglyphs, and Dorrie studied them thoughtfully—as if, Trent imagined, she could see something there that no one else could. He felt a teeming of irrational love wash over him—a series of goofy similes for Dorrie, who was as dreamy and mysterious as an anemone in the eddies of cigarette smoke, who was like a picture of the mythological goddess Diana, which he’d seen on the cover of one of Dorrie’s books, Diana turning
a hunter into a stag, or like—but he was already embarrassed by his own brain.

“Do you want to dance?” Trent said at last, because a slow song was playing, and Dorrie looked up from whatever she had been thinking, seeming to register this idea from far away.

“No,” Dorrie said. “I don’t believe I do.”

“That’s a great idea,” David Bender said. “Come on, Dorrie. I’d love to see you boogie down. Or honky-tonk. Whatever.”

“I don’t like to dance,” Dorrie said, and lowered her eyelids in a way that made Trent realize that she was, in fact, very stoned. The notion struck him as deeply erotic.

“That’s okay,” he said. He smiled at David Bender and held up his palm in some vague signal. “It’s okay,” he said to David Bender, to whom he felt a new and friendly affection. “I’m going to get us a pitcher of beer. We don’t have to dance. We can just talk.”

“That sounds good, too,” David Bender said. “If Dorrie is willing to drink a beer.”

“I think I can manage that,” she said.

Standing at the bar with his money held out, it occurred to Trent to think of something David Bender had said earlier.
Dorrie’s been having affairs with her students for as long as I can remember
. It came back to Trent in little shards of words, and he mulled each one over as he leaned on the bar. It was probably true. Of course it was true, but it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Hadn’t David Bender said that Trent had lasted longer than any of the others, that there seemed to be something special about Dorrie’s relationship with him? Trent wielded his twenty-dollar bill at a
passing, hurried bartender, and thoughts turned around inside him. “Affairs,” he thought. “For as long as I can remember,” he thought. He looked over his shoulder, toward where Dorrie and David Bender were talking avidly. Maybe they were talking about him, Trent thought as he snagged the bartender and ordered a pitcher and three glasses. It occurred to him that he could do something outrageous; he could climb up on top of the bar and propose to her, right here, in front of all these people. “Dorrie,” he could exclaim. “I love you! Will you marry me?” He thought of this as the bartender sloshed the pitcher onto the surface in front of him; he thought of this as he picked up the pitcher and glasses and headed back to their booth. “Dorrie!” he called, and she looked up, searching through the milling people to find him, lifting her hand, puzzled.

She was sitting alone. David Bender had gone off to find the rest room, and when he set down the pitcher she was gazing vaguely at something in the air beyond, like a cat observing a bee. He had begun to pour the beer, carefully, into the glasses when she finally seemed to notice him.

“I can’t believe that you got him stoned,” she said. “I didn’t even know you smoked pot.”

“I don’t,” he said. He scooted into the booth beside her, sliding his arm over the back of the booth, around her shoulder. “I mean, I’m not a regular pot smoker, if that’s what you mean. I hope you’re not mad.”

She shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what to think right now. This whole thing is very strange. I think it’s a big mistake.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe this was really an uncool thing to do.”

“Probably,” she said, and she mused a little, privately. He was aware that she was drifting beyond his reach, and he pressed closer to her. “I’m an idiot,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” Trent said. “It’s really okay. We’ll have a good time. That’s all. Everything will be fine!” He watched as she nodded, as she looked off again, toward something abstract she saw in the distance. He leaned over and pressed his lips against her mouth. “Mmm,” she said, half protesting, and it was a moment before she began to kiss him back, letting her tongue slip between his teeth, along the inside of his cheek. She caught his hand as he pressed it against her breast, his fingers tracing along the edge of her bra.

“Oh, my God,” he heard David Bender say, and Trent glanced up to see him sliding into his seat across from them. “Stop it, you two. I’m experiencing the primal scene.” And Dorrie struggled for a moment when she heard David’s voice, stiffening and edging out of Trent’s embrace. He drew back.