And the Dark Sacred Night (13 page)

They watch the beginning of the show, the discovery of a corpse under a bush in a city park. You have to give this show your full attention from the start or you are lost. Jasper wonders when, and how, he will ask why the boy is really here. He has a feeling Kit’s purpose is thwarted by something.
Delicate
, he called himself a moment ago; thinks it’s something for which he needs to feel apologetic. Ah, set the boy right, thinks Jasper, but now here’s that dame detective with the perpetually alarmed expression on her face, mouth set sour and slightly agape, as if no joke will ever make her laugh again. Looks like she just took a slug of vinegar. Honestly now, who finds that appealing? But then there’s the way she unholsters and flashes that gun whenever she senses danger. And how about the tight blouse? Definitely appealing, that.

The next day is sunny, good for the too-many tasks at the house if not the onset of another ski season in central Vermont. Jim’s begun his deafening dissection of the tree, Kit’s prying broken boards off the corner of the house. Jasper sets them up with a thermos of coffee, a box of doughnuts. When Jim opens the box, Kit looks at the doughnuts as if they are raw chicken livers.

“What, you jonesin’ for colored jimmies?” says Jasper.

“I haven’t had doughnuts in ages.”

“Forbidden food? Listen up. Stick around here, you better lose the wife on the shoulder. I got my doctor spying on my diet from afar, and that is bad enough.”

Jim laughs. “Not so easy as you think, Jazzman. You’ve been free too long to remember what it’s like.”

“Boy, that wife of yours keeps you out of trouble and
alive
.”

Ten years back, when Jim was in high school, he worked summers clearing trails on the mountain for Jasper. He talked about going to college, ambitious for the son of a short-order cook and a drugstore salesclerk. Then, senior year, he got Debbie pregnant. But Debbie’s a
good girl, not a tramp. Jasper thinks she keeps Jim straight; maybe he’d never have stuck out college in the first place. For a couple years, he had a full-time job on maintenance at the slope, but then came the layoffs.

Satisfied that the young men know what they’re doing, speaking the same language (more or less), Jasper drives to the shop. Time to inventory everything, shift the balance of merchandise from hike and bike to ski and skate. Three years ago, the outfit that manages the slope (aka, the devil from Atlanta) bought a plot of adjoining land and built an indoor rink; they offer hockey clinics all year long. Somehow, it’s all the rage with women. Like boxing, Loraina says. Seems as if no sport remains sacrosanct to men. (Sumo wrestling, maybe? Discus throwing?) Women want to punch each other black and blue or lose their front teeth to a puck, it’s no skin off Jasper’s back. Just perplexing. All that padding to rent, as well as the sticks and skates; that part of it’s good. Loraina thinks they ought to sell little figure-skating outfits, sequined tutus. Too much, too fussy, Jasper argues. He is not running a boutique here. He’d have to add honest-to-God fitting rooms. Right now, you want to try on a pair of ski pants, Loraina clears you a space in the stockroom behind the register.

“Not a word about this mayhem,” she says when he walks in. She stands between a huge carton of jumbled ski boots, flotsam from the previous season, and a series of rows she is constructing, pair by pair, like an army from the knees down. “And I have to warn you, we are out of coffee. I’m a dragon.”

You might say Loraina is always a dragon. He calls her greeting the Daily Don’t. Once in a while, she greets him as anyone else would, but usually she starts with a warning.
Don’t tell me it’s getting icy out there.… Do not talk to me about those SOBs in Congress.… On pain of slow death, do not walk with those muddy boots across the floor I just mopped
.

“So send Stu to the deli,” says Jasper. “What do we pay him for?”

“Stu is out sick. I think I know what kind of sick. Stu was sighted at the Loft last night, after midnight. Wobbling to his truck. From which I assume he wobbled to bed and passed out. Speaking of pay, I do not make enough money to do work this stupid.”

“I have urged you often to retire.”

She glares at him, her blue mascara embellishing her scorn. Her
doctor, like his, has probably made the same suggestion. She may, in fact, be older than Jasper. Hard to tell, even naked. She’s in pretty good shape for however old she happens to be. Helps that she never had babies.

Loraina’s crankiness is a shell. It’s been more than a year since the last time she came home with Jasper, just another of so many random nights when they decided they might as well spend it together. So maybe he’ll get to enjoy her cranky-sexy presence in his bed again, her grumbling generosity, the heat of her surprisingly muscular legs, but he doubts it. Those days in their relationship are probably over, for reasons no more definable than a change of seasons.

Jasper depends on Loraina. Not just on her business sense but on her knowing him so well that she does and does not call him on his quirks. Jasper wouldn’t want to marry again—twice was plenty—but he needs various partnerships, however casual, simply to keep on going. The dogs are one kind of alliance; Jim (mostly due to his various skills) is another.

Jim has become, it’s clear, a surrogate son. As for the real sons, one is too far away, the other too mulishly helpless, as if stuck to the bottom of his own shoe. (Jasper’s recently wondered if he’s turning Jim into a subconscious do-over there. Would that mean he’s given up on Kyle?)

Loraina, mind reader that she is, says, “Your stepson get here?”

“Last night. I got him working on the hole in my house.”

“What kind of hospitality’s that?”

“He should what, lie around the house and read?”

“If that’s how he likes it. I’d guess he’s here for R and R.”

“He offered to pitch in. He’s got Jim for company.”

Loraina has a brittle, crinkling laugh, like dry leaves. She smokes too much, one thing about her that worries Jasper. She says it’s what keeps her “thinnish,” and thinnish, she points out, is healthier than fattish.

“Jim for company’s like cereal for dinner,” she says.

“You know what?” says Jasper. “You are mean.”

“I am truthful. You like that about me, remember?”

Jasper crosses the store and looks out the picture window that frames a postcard of the main run, the one that had better turn a glistening white within the next two or three weeks. Fake snow’s expensive,
never as good as the real thing. Last weekend, a good swath of Maine got six inches. Sugarloaf is up and running. He takes the binoculars down from the hook. He spots a pair of hikers near the brink of the hill.

“They’re off to camp,” says Loraina, standing behind him. “Fools from Rhode Island with backpacks as big as the state.”

“We equip them?”

“They stopped in for energy bars, water bottles. Matches,” she says.

“Vegetarian jerky types, I bet.”

“We stock such a thing?”

Jasper snorts. “You’d be the one to know that.”

Their conversation lopes along—weather forecast, rental fees, new vendors, Stu’s work ethic (lack thereof)—until the door opens to the next few customers. They hesitate at the sight of all the ski boots; Loraina hastens to assure them that yes, the shop is open. Can she help? This is the slowest time of year, the stretch between Halloween and Thanksgiving. The fuss over foliage is past, and even if it snows like blazes, only the diehards show up so early. Even people who like the great outdoors take their weekend leisure in the city now: theater, museums, exotic meals. For Jasper, it’s a season of too much time to think. Good thing, perhaps, that Kit’s shown up now. Though it means there will have to be talk about Daphne.

“That’s what you get for meeting a dame at a funeral,” Rayburn said at the earliest signs of trouble. But even Rayburn had thought she was a find, a don’t-let-this-one-out-of-your-sight, the first two or three times he met her. Pretty, talented, smart. Not, like other women who’d fallen into her fix, bitter. Packaged with just the one well-behaved son: meaning (or so she assured Jasper when they got to that stage of their courtship) she was done with babies.

Maybe the problem was that he hadn’t set out, like a mission with a well-defined map, to find his own boys a New Mother—which is what some people had actually advised him to do. Rayburn’s wife, Sharon, told him, “Make a list with three columns: ‘Must-Haves,’ ‘Might-Haves,’ ‘No Way in Hell.’ Stick to it.” Starting about the minute Vivian was in the ground, there were fix-ups, one bust after another. As Rayburn put it, women willing to be fixed up generally
remind you of hounds: so eager on the scent, you’d swear you see a wagging tail.

The first time Daphne met Rory and Kyle, she impressed them with her youth, her closeness to their age rather than to their father’s. She was almost midway, in years, between Rory and Jasper: twelve years older than the son, eleven younger than the father. Watching her banter with his sons about music—the boys’ music, not the music he’d heard Daphne play the day he met her—gave him a moment’s pause, a chilly doubt, but she had been a mother for nearly ten years, and didn’t that tilt her toward an older generation, give her an extra five years or so? Besides which, he
needed
a woman who knew how to be a mother. If he’d gone and made Sharon’s list, wouldn’t that have fallen under “Must-Haves”?

Daphne’s search for a mate probably was a mission. She did nothing to hide it. And why ever should she? Single mother of a boy, earning a living as a public-school teacher and occasional church musician: good Lord, she’d have been a fool not to look for a man like Jasper—settled with kids of his own, cleanly widowed rather than divorced. The sheer suddenness, the fluke of how Vivian died—cerebral aneurysm, alone at home—had left Jasper in a semipermanent state of shock, more open to any woman than he might have been had he gone through the drawn-out campaign, the hardening wretchedness of nursing a spouse through a terminal illness. That kind of loss was in fact a release, he learned in later years, watching couples go through the hell of cancer. Losing your spouse to cancer might break your heart several times over, but from what Jasper’s seen, it leaves you feeling as free as you feel bereft, like a diver breaking the surface of a lake after a drowning scare. You’re more careful about what comes next.

Rayburn was at that funeral, too. It was for their friend Litch, who went down in his plane heading north to fish. Litch’s wife, who taught at the same high school as Daphne, asked her to play at the service. So she was there in the church—in that dark blue velvet dress, her long sunstruck hair clipped back from her face with those flashing jeweled butterflies, clasping that cello like a brawny lover between her legs, playing those notes of a sorrow so elegant you almost felt glad for the occasion—and then, to Jasper’s surprise, she was at the reception, too, putting platters of food on the table, peeling
off Saran wrap with the same willowy fingers that played those notes an hour before, the music that gave nobility to grief, that made you stop thinking, for a minute,
Litch, you cocky bastard, they
predicted
that goddamn monsoon!

“We know her?” Jasper asked Rayburn that day in the church hall, already wolfing the deviled eggs she’d just uncovered.

“We’d sure know it if we did. And know her we soon must. Or you, you lovelorn wifeless lout. You lucky stiff. The other
kind
of stiff.” Rayburn chuckled. “Quoth the actress to the bishop.” Rayburn, who’d barely survived his second tour in Vietnam, would have joked his way through Armageddon.

Vivian had been dead for two years. Jasper had discreetly sampled a few women in that time, most of them hardly candidates for moving into his bed on a permanent basis.

Sometimes he wonders whether, if he’d met Loraina back then, he might have considered her instead. But parallel to that point in Jasper’s life, Loraina had been married, living in upstate New York, drunk for the half of every month she knew she wasn’t pregnant. That was her tale about where she was back then.

How easy it was to fall for Daphne. Daphne deserved to be fallen for, let that be said. She, in turn, genuinely fell for Jasper. Even in the cracked rearview mirror, no doubt about that. Sweet, those first few years. They made each other sweet; they made each other clever, funny, alluring, sexy as hell. Gave each other energy to spare, to love the children through years when the children feigned indifference and scorn. They made each other bulletproof when it came to tough emotions. What was that if not so-called true love? Who said true meant forever?

“The best kind of blindness, that’s for sure” was Rayburn’s assessment in hindsight. Rayburn was still married to his high-school sweetheart (still is). He expressed the crude opinion that love, as a concept, was akin to cancer. Not that it was a disease, or even that it stood a fair chance of killing you (though it could), but that it was a force whose complexities couldn’t be understood from the outside. It had an octopus nature, he said. It was, in fact, nowhere near a single entity. “Oughta be several dozen words for the different species of love, just like the Eskimo words for snow,” he offered as an aside. But then he hewed back to its kinship with cancer. Love was manifold,
and it was cunning in its unpredictability. Sometimes it was invincible, even in the face of dire threats; other times easily poisoned. Ask Rayburn about love vis-à-vis his own marriage, to Sharon, and he would say, “Trying to figure out if you’re still in love after so many years is like trying to remember the misery of heat when you’re suffering the misery of cold. Or vicey versa. Inconceivable.”

Rayburn had opinions, even sermons, on every subject under the sun. He’d been lucky enough to stumble on a gift for elocution while cursing out the torment of physical therapy following service in that earlier pointless war. Severe burns over his left arm and torso put him out of commission for any kind of hard physical work—specifically, work in his father’s auto-body shop.

Until recently, he had a radio show out of Woodstock. Rayburn loved to hear himself talk; good thing others did, too. He still does, but he doesn’t make quite so much sense. A couple years ago, he started getting large blank spots in his memory. “Holes in my ozone layer,” he joked when it began. “First signs of my fatal brain tumor”: that was another of the many ways he made fun of suddenly not knowing where he was driving; or putting the butter away in his toolbox; or turning on the shower, then heading downstairs to open the mail, standing around buck naked in the kitchen while puzzling over utility bills.