Bertrand Court (18 page)

He kissed her breast through her T-shirt and rolled out of bed, pulling up his boxers as he left, his sinewy nakedness casting a shadow along the wall.

Alone in bed, she hugged herself in a futile attempt to stave off the insanely cold northern Wisconsin night.

After breakfast, they joined Bud and Dot for a walk through a patch of woods behind the cabin to pick blackberries. Becca's nose ran like a hose. Timmy and his parents said nothing as they tweezed blackberries from the bushes, nothing as they'd eaten their pancakes earlier that morning, nothing, nothing, nothing. They didn't talk politics or joke around or talk with their mouths full of food. They didn't talk at all.

By mid-morning, the waistband of Becca's jean shorts strained against her abdomen, bloated from holding in two days' worth of waste; mosquitoes had feasted on her calves, and Bud had pulled a tick off her neck.

“Got a treat for you, Timmy,” Bud announced after a lunch of olive-loaf sandwiches on white bread, with potato chips and lukewarm lemonade. “Hank Sawyer gave us a couple of passes to see the Minocqua Bats.”

“Bats?” God, no.

“Not real bats, Becca. They're professional water skiers, and boy, can they fly.”

“Like bats.” Relieved, Becca picked an olive from the loaf.

“You bet.” Bud smiled.

Did that mean that they got to leave the compound? That she'd have a night out with Timmy? That she might find nirvana in a public bathroom? A sense of hope buoyed her, and four hours later, Timmy drove Becca to Minocqua, home of walnut fudge and her new best friend Patty.

“So, how am I doing?” She tried to sound casual, ironic.

“Good,” he grunted, squinting into the sun.

“Your mom hates me,” she said, hoping he'd deny it.

“You don't have to try so hard.”

“You think I'm trying too hard?” she answered too quickly.

“Can we just have a good time?”

“I'll try.”

“Good.”

“But not too hard.”

He grinned. She loved to make him smile.

Becca found the ladies' room immediately, ignoring a woman checking out her pink shoes. The woman and Dot wore the kind of sandals she always thought were designated for people with foot problems. Dr. Somethings. She didn't care; she felt lighter, and happy to be alone with Timmy.

She'd never seen anything like the Minocqua Bats. They were all fit, broad-shouldered, Nordic-looking people who whizzed off ramps, bodies perched precariously over their sleek slalom skis, like Olympic jumpers, or real bats flying into the fresh Wisconsin air. Free.

“So why are they called bats and not robins or bluebirds?” Becca took a swig of beer.

“Bats are the only mammal in the world naturally capable of flight.” Timmy was an Eagle Scout and he knew a lot about animals and hardware stores. He also explained how bats saw better at night than any other mammal.

Maybe so, but she still loathed those disease-laden flying rodents, a fact she would never divulge to him.

Timmy and Becca drank beer and ate slices of pepperoni pizza on a faded orange blanket that Bud and Dot had probably picnicked on a million times while marveling at the very same feats. Becca leaned her back against Timmy's chest and relaxed into the rhythm of his warm breath on her hair. She wondered if anybody had ever died doing one of these jumps, but she said nothing. Timmy told her that she worried too much about dying and injuries. Clearly, stories of pogroms and genocide hadn't sullied his emotional DNA.

They lay on the blanket until it got dark. She'd never seen the stars from so far north; she felt like she could reach up and touch them with her fingertips.

“There's the Big Dipper. People say it looks like a ladle, but I think it looks more like a wagon.” He took her hand in his and pointed it toward the sky. “That's the handle.”

“I see it.” It did look more like a wagon. Timmy was one of the smartest people she knew. A World War II buff and an avid reader of biographies of obscure scientists, he beat her at Trivial Pursuit every time.

Becca caught a chill during the drive home, so she unbuckled her seat belt and slid next to Timmy. He stuck a Charlie Daniels Band tape in the deck and thumped his fingers on the steering wheel to some song about the devil going to Georgia. She hadn't even bothered bringing her music on the trip — Laura Nyro, the Fairport Convention, Rickie Lee Jones — folky stuff her parents liked, too. Wanting more of him before they got back to his parents' cabin, she put her tongue in his ear and tasted his saltiness.

“Cut it out, Becca,” he said, but she could tell that he liked what she was doing.

She nibbled his neck, where he was super ticklish, and he laughed. She could feel his muscles contract against her ribs.

The skinny road wound through stands of tall pines and birches. It was as black as a tunnel, no streetlights or vapor lamps. A station wagon full of drunk kids whirled by them, honking the horn; a girl with an auburn ponytail hung her head out the window and screamed, “Go, Badgers!”

Timmy shrugged. “Badger Country.”

“Man, they're sloshed,” Becca said, and tickled Timmy's neck again.

As his stomach contracted with a fresh giggle, a deer darted across the road. Seconds later, their truck hit the animal with a loud thud and the screeching of brakes. Becca flew forward, her shoulder smashing into the vent on the dashboard.

“Jesus Christ,” Timmy muttered. “You okay?”

Becca nodded as adrenaline coursed through her body; she felt numb. “I think so.” Her shoulder was beginning to throb.

Timmy's eyes narrowed into slits, hyper-alert, wild and calm at the same time, a more concentrated version of the expression he'd worn the night they met, after he'd fought that newsworthy fire. He pulled the truck over to the side of the road and left the engine running while he ran to the spot where the deer lay splayed on the asphalt. The truck's taillights cast a dull glow on the animal as it struggled to move its legs. Thank God. He hadn't killed it.

A flash of Timmy's sweatshirt disappeared into the forest on the other side of the road. Part of her wanted to chase after him, part of her wanted to drag the deer from the highway, but most of her just froze. She wadded up some tissue paper from the Minocqua Soda and Fudge Shoppe and wiped blood from her shoulder.

She watched for Timmy through the back window, which made her shoulder hurt even more. She felt better when he popped out of the woods carrying a rock the size of a bowling ball, moving awkwardly yet with the certainty of a man who ran five miles a day to keep in shape. A man who would walk into a burning building. He leaned down, lowering his body over the deer's, as he had over hers so many times. Against the star-filled sky, she could only make out his silhouette as he stood and raised the boulder over his head. Then he brought it down, and sediment met bone. When he came back to the truck, his face revealed an expression she'd never seen, a mixture of kindness and regret. And love.

They drove home in silence, except for the noise of the deer carcass sliding around in the back of the truck. For once she was grateful for the quiet. He reached out to her, and she slid next to him so that their thighs touched. She could feel his body heat through her jeans, that current from the Klinc Bar. Now it scared her.

Back at the cabin, he sent her inside while he dealt with the carcass. Bud and Dot were asleep. Becca lay trembling in her cold bed. When he came in, she avoided his gaze as he pulled back the covers and stood over her. He smelled like blood and sour sweat. A wet warmth soaked her thighs and Dot's sun-dried sheets. He slowly licked the palm of his hand and placed it on one nipple, then the other, and slid his hand down her belly until she arched her back, her body begging him to touch her. Eventually, he did.

He tipped her chin up, and she could smell herself on his finger. When she finally looked at him, she noticed a line of blood streaking his cheekbone. She saw everything in his eyes: tenderness and cruelty. She pulled him into her, knowing that she'd be a different person when they finished making love, when they finished scraping and scratching at the outer edges of who they were, when they finished with each other for good.

Becca arrived at the airport well in time for her flight. The sky looked like blue glass, and the low roar of airplane engines made her heart race. She walked quickly to the check-in counter and waited in line behind a young businessman sharing the importance of his cell phone call with the crowd.

Finally, her turn. A pleasant-looking woman with a Wisconsin accent like Timmy's asked for her confirmation number and photo ID. Becca reached into her bag to pull out her wallet, which felt slimmer than usual. The plastic case holding her credit card and driver's license was gone. She didn't even bother tearing the bag apart, because she remembered that she'd left the case next to her computer last night when she bought one plane ticket to Rhinelander and four to Tel Aviv. “Don't forget to put your license back in your purse,” she'd reminded herself aloud. But she had.

The agent looked at her sympathetically. “You've got time,” she said, glancing at Becca's wedding ring. “Can your husband bring you your license?”

“I don't think so,” Becca answered.

Becca bought herself a bottled water and a slab of fudge from an airport candy stand and settled into a comfortable seat facing the window. She hadn't eaten fudge since her trip to Minocqua. She'd meditated, written dozens of bad poems, and even tried to find God in order to return to that place, a place inhabited by dead deer and pine trees and a decent man who would have destroyed her, brutally and without malice.

Perhaps she watched ten or fifteen planes take off; she lost count. At noon, she hailed a cab and went home. She put a frozen Tupperware container of veggie chili into the fridge for dinner, emptied the dishwasher, and returned her toiletries to their shelves and holders. She tore the plastic from her black suit and hung it next to Adam's naked shirt, so close that the garments touched.

MORE SO

Adam Kornfeld, July 2007

P
lease call Georgia Dumfries
. Adam glanced at the two-day-old message his assistant had scrawled on a Post-it note. He'd forgotten to return Georgia's call, confirmation that his one indiscretion in eighteen years of marriage hadn't affected him after all. He'd assumed that if he ever cheated on Becca he'd feel guilt or remorse or some kind of emotion that would surprise him entirely and erode his marriage. He loved his wife — even more so now — yet he would feel perfectly comfortable sharing an elevator with the woman he'd slept with on an innocuous Sunday evening last April while Becca and the boys circled Ben Gurion International Airport. A client emergency had kept him from enjoying his fiftieth birthday trip that Becca had organized.

He stared at his computer screen and thought about the night he'd bumped into Georgia at a trendy Woodley Park café. The month before, he'd hired her to edit an AFL-CIO video, and he figured he owed her a drink after trapping her in a windowless room with his OCD client for days on end. They drank too much red wine, shared an order of buffalo wings, and whispered in the gardens of the National Cathedral, two blocks from Georgia's apartment, their final destination for the evening. Adam made it home in time to watch the eleven o'clock news, one hour before he officially turned fifty. And one week after that, when Becca returned from Israel, tanned and spiritually sated, with an olive-wood sculpture for his office and a Ziploc baggie full of new pebbles for their fire pit, they skipped the season premiere of
The Sopranos
to make love in the shower.

He'd return Georgia's call on Tuesday, after the long Fourth of July holiday. He stacked papers in piles as he anticipated the weekend with Becca, the honeymoon period before the house would start sounding too quiet and they would surreptitiously glance at the calendar, eager for the boys to come home from summer camp. Tonight they would make love and then drift into a seamless sleep, without the worry that Isaac would have a car accident, without Jason's running cell phone patter with various members of the freshman class of Bethesda–Chevy Chase High. Becca would spend Saturday with her friend Hannah at some drum circle up in Baltimore while Adam slept late, futzed around on his guitar, and thumbed through the stack of
New Yorkers
that had accumulated next to his bed. They would enjoy a nice dinner — maybe Indian, the boys hated curry — and he'd convince her to catch the
new Bruce Willis thriller with him.

Through a lazy smile, he crunched on a sliver of ice he'd mined from his morning iced Americano. His direct line rang. Must be Becca. “Kornfeld Group,” he answered.

“Adam. It's Georgia.”

He felt a surge of excitement at the sound of her voice and indulged himself with the image of her straddling him, blouse unbuttoned, lacy maroon bra exposed. “Georgia, hello!” he said with a bit too much enthusiasm.

The rest of the conversation was a blur, save for a string of words that stuck out like rusty nails through an old board. Ex-boyfriend. Gonorrhea. Before you put the condom on. Asymptomatic. Tested positive. So sorry. He ended the call quickly, and after he hung up, he put his clammy fingers to his temples, hot and pulsing. His heart crawled into his throat as he tried to remember how many times he'd thrust into Georgia before she diplomatically dislodged herself to retrieve a condom from her nightstand. Two? Three? Did it matter?

He Googled gonorrhea first, and then internists who practiced in Virginia. South of Fairfax County. A world away from his suburban Maryland home. He wasn't going to call David, his doctor and fellow member of the search committee for a new chief rabbi at their temple. Nobody could see him until Tuesday morning, 9:45 at the earliest. Ninety more hours. Ninety hours ago would have been Monday evening; he was talking to a social worker named Rhoda about when and where to move his mother. Alzheimer's.

He emailed Becca, knowing that he couldn't trust himself to talk to her:
New client called. Have to put together a dog and pony show for Tuesday. See you at 7. Love, A.

He had to pee. He used a stall even though he was the only person left in the building. Everything felt like it should, a painless stream of coffee-scented urine. Then he sat on the toilet and inspected himself, the backs of his sweaty thighs sticking to the seat. No redness. No swelling. No gleet. Gleet. It was the kind of word Becca would serve up during a game of Scrabble; she'd reach for her worn
Oxford American Dictionary
and recite, “Gleet. Noun. The thick, copious urethral pus discharge associated with sexually transmitted diseases.” She'd fold her lovely arms over her breasts, smug about her verbal acuity and presumed immunity from firsthand exposure to such a noun. And why not? What middle-aged former soccer coach, advocate for all the proper lefty causes, and master of the chords to every Crosby, Stills & Nash song ever written would infect his wife with the clap? Jesus.

His breathing felt shallow, and he wondered if he was having a heart attack, if he might die. His first impulse was not to call 911 or try out some of Becca's yoga breathing, but to go back online and tidy up his browser, removing the list of sites with the word “gonorrhea” attached to them.

His house looked different when he turned into the driveway. He took it in as if the bank might foreclose on it at any second: the big oak tree that hovered over the roof, scaring the crap out of Becca when the winds blew strong; Becca's blue-turned-purple hydrangeas encircling the front porch; the basketball hoop he'd won at the school raffle last fall; the squeaky swing where he'd spied Jason making out with his girlfriend, trying to cop a feel, and the fire pit out back.

The house smelled like challah and the chicken Becca was roasting. She had set the table for Shabbat. Odd. Normally the boys' absence meant Chinese takeout or omelets, “a Shabbat from Shabbat,” Becca called it.

“I'm up here, babe,” she hollered down from their bedroom.

The cicadas chirred so loudly he could hear them through the closed window; tonight the sound chafed his nerves. He poured himself a shot of vodka.

Becca appeared and kissed him on the mouth. “That new client driving you to drink already?”

He wasn't a very good liar, so he dodged the question. “Shabbat shalom?” He pointed to the candles with a questioning look.

“I was in the mood.” She winked.

“Glad to hear it.” He delivered the expected response and halfheartedly patted her ass.

Adam dimmed the lights, and Becca stood in front of the candlesticks, a wedding present from his sister, the blue and white ceramic slightly chipped. He'd never noticed that before. Becca ushered in the Sabbath with circular arm motions that culminated in covering her eyes. She always let her hands linger there for a minute to pray away her fears and take stock of all that was good — “blessing the hell out of life,” she called it. She sang the prayer over the candles; as usual, it sounded like a Joni Mitchell song, pre-
Court and Spark
.

If the boys were here, Adam would feign disapproval while they teased Becca about her weekly Joni impersonation. But tonight the sound of her chanting — earnest, soulful, and a bit off key — impaled him. He'd
heard her sing for the first time almost thirty years ago, when the staff of Camp Kehilah celebrated Shabbat two days before the campers arrived for the first session. Now the soft candlelight framed her curls, strands of gray flecking a shade of red that meant the hair would lose the rest of its pigment soon. Fine lines fanned out from the corners of her small blue eyes. Still, she didn't look much different from that fast-talking BU freshman he'd fallen in love with at first sight.

It occurred to him then that Becca was built like — well, Georgia. Same small breasts and waist, same round hips and wiry hair. But Georgia, a quiet observer, would never have helped him lead a dining hall packed with a hundred and seventy-five kids in a light-bulb-rattling rendition of “Dodi Li,” or enrolled in a pole-dancing class to shake her middle-aged booty with abandon.

“Earth to Adam.” Becca interrupted his thoughts. “You going to do the kiddush?”

He could detect the tightness in his voice as he raced through the blessing over the wine. In two weeks' time, when the boys returned home from camp, would he place his hands over their heads and murmur the blessings, or would his family have been decimated by his reckless stupidity?

Sitting across from Becca, chewing her fresh-baked challah, he could barely taste what might be the last Shabbat meal as he knew it. He half listened as Becca described her road trip to Baltimore with Hannah the next morning for a women's drum circle she'd talked Hannah into trying. Becca had embraced the Landmark Forum, veganism, and the La Leche movement with passion. She'd studied the Torah with their rabbi to prepare for her adult bat mitzvah ceremony the year she turned forty-five. She'd filled notebooks with bad poetry and trotted off to exotic locales to attend writing seminars that only confirmed her lack of talent. She didn't care; she loved the energy.

Thank God for Becca's new hot yoga class; she'd fallen asleep with her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose and a copy of
The Audacity of Hope
splayed across a sexy black camisole. She'd worn a skirt with no panties to dinner, and he knew she meant business; he'd have had to feign some horrible ailment to spurn her overtures. His bones ached from the exhaustion of living with his secret. Eighty-three more hours and he'd find out what he'd done. Eighty-three hours ago would have been Tuesday morning. He'd just given his office manager, Lizzie, a month off to help out with her grandchildren in Arizona. Her son had electrocuted himself to death last month.

He peeled down to his boxers, swallowed a couple of Dramamine, and waited for the usual wave of drowsiness to engulf him. He dreamt about a bat. He and Becca used to sneak off to an empty cabin at Camp Kehilah to make love. One night they fell asleep and woke at dawn to find a bat perched on the torn blue-and-white-striped mattress. Eleven months later, a hysterical Becca called his college dorm to tell him she'd read that bats' teeth are so small that they can bite people without their feeling it, that bats are the most rabid animals in the world, that she and Adam should have their spinal fluid tested for exposure, that rabies makes you die a neurological nightmare of a death. If they experienced no symptoms after a year, they'd be safe. For the next month, he called twice a day, subsidizing his phone bill by bartending at a small tavern just north of campus.

Adam awoke from his batmare at 3:15 a.m. Gonorrhea aside, he couldn't shake a vague feeling of dread, as if he'd been bitten by something rabid long before he slept with Georgia.

Becca's alarm sounded at the crack of dawn. She fumbled around for her yoga clothes, and when she kissed Adam goodbye, he could smell her body lotion and a hint of garlic from last night's chicken. The thought of Georgia jumped out at him the way Jason used to when they were playing hide-and-seek. He'd first met her at a barbecue hosted by his neighbors Tad and Nikki, when he accidentally squirted ketchup on her white tank top; she laughed, and her breath smelled clean, like seltzer water or air.

Adam tossed and turned for hours, trying to go back to sleep. He hadn't stayed in bed this long since Isaac brought home the rotavirus from preschool, and then a lot of throwing up was involved. This morning he felt like that big oak tree in the front yard had landed on his chest. He didn't move, except to pee twice. Still no burning or any other signs. A raging caffeine headache roused him from his bed at one in the afternoon.

He took his coffee up to the attic and began looking through old photographs. He pulled out an album his mother had given him before she started losing her memory: 1960, Adam wearing a pointy hat and blowing out three birthday candles; 1970, Adam becoming a bar mitzvah; 1974, Adam practicing a 1-4-5 chord pattern on his cousin's Gibson.

A loose wedding photo fell out of the album: Becca grinning, wearing a flowered wreath around her head and a long veil that came down to her ankles. He found another photo taken under the chuppah: Adam standing between Becca and his mother, whose pink suit hung on her formerly plump body. She'd lost fifteen pounds since the fitting, the day before Adam's father turned fifty. The day he died.

Adam pulled out Becca's old summer camp album and pored over photos of the two of them posing with their favorite campers. Becca wore a brown two-piece bathing suit and friendship bracelets up and down her forearms and in clusters around her ankles. The kids idolized her, and every guy at camp wanted a piece of her. He'd felt lucky that she was his.

The last two pages of the album were filled with photos of Becca and the fireman who broke her heart. Timmy Carver. Her grand love, borderline obsession. Adam once overheard Becca announce to her book club that she'd married him because he fit like an old pair of Birkenstocks, but that Timmy was the one that got away. How absurd — Becca boiling bratwursts and guzzling beer with the firefighters of Minocqua, Wisconsin. Who the hell lives in Wisconsin?

An old fury grabbed hold of him. He shoved the albums into the cobwebs and went downstairs to make banana pancakes, leaving a big puddle of batter on the counter; he'd feast on his Timmy Carver anger like a German shepherd on a porterhouse. Becca's words swirled around in his head. An old pair of Birkenstocks. The guy with the guitar, every summer camp has one, an NJB, a nice Jewish boy. Well, maybe this NJB wasn't so N after all. The phone rang.

“Dad, it's me,” Jason said in his man-boy voice.

Adam practically jumped through the phone line. “Hey, big guy! How's it going up there?”

“I slalomed today.” Jason's excitement bubbled under his matter-of-fact delivery of the news.

Adam imagined the camp's lethargic motorboat pulling skinny Jason as he squinted into the Maine sun, his nose red and peeling. “Way to go, J.”