Days of Awe (16 page)

Page 47. There they were. Mud hens, cross-listed as the American coot, which, if I'd pointed it out to Cal, probably would have put the nail in this coffin.

“Welp,” I said, handing the book back to him. “You're right. There they are.”

We were a few feet down the dock, the water lapping against the wood. On the other side of the lake, a small group of people huddled by the edge, peering down at something. There were four of them, three tall and one short, all wearing bright spring jackets: a nylon bouquet of crimson, lime green, yellow, and magenta. The tallest one crouched down, put an arm around the little one, and pointed to the water. I couldn't make out their genders or their features or the relationships to one another. They were just a little cluster of humans investigating something. We hadn't come across any other people out here, either, I realized: just a goose, a mud hen, and those four people in the distance.

Cal leaned close to me and lifted the binoculars from around my neck. The intimacy of it surprised me: his fingers on the back of my neck, his warm breath. He raised the binoculars to his eyes and aimed his gaze across the lake. “A flock of Great Northern Suburbanites. Flightless, brightly marked.”

He was trying—to repair a minor rip in the fabric? Or to bring the afternoon to a gentle and permanent conclusion? I had no idea. Maybe he was remembering what it had been like to be here with Catherine, twenty years ago, when he knew the woman he was with, and his family was whole.

The wind whipped up from nowhere, a sudden sharp gust. It was hard to breathe again, just like that. The tallest human across the lake, the one in the lime-green jacket, looked up suddenly and waved at us. I waved back.

“The last time I was here,” I said, “my friend almost got one of our students killed. She…the little girl, Claire…she was deathly allergic to bees, and she got stung. My friend was the teacher in charge of the medication. She was supposed to have Claire's EpiPen with her at all times, but she forgot it on the bus.” I couldn't say Josie's name. I was using her brazenly, betraying her again. I swallowed a thick lump of shame. She was my excuse for all of it.

“But she was all right?” Cal said.

I shrugged. “The little girl? Yeah. She was okay.”

“The idea of being responsible for so many people.” He blew a little puff of air. “Well, I always felt that I chose the right line of work, wrangling nucleotide chains rather than human beings.” Cal worked for the university, doing research on type 1 diabetes. He didn't talk about it much, but I had Googled him, of course. He had won a big award a few years ago, and an NIH grant. “I like that my work is quantifiable,” he went on. “That, at least in my lab, when it's just me and the DNA, I'm not at the mercy of anyone's emotions.”

I nodded. Jim Ambrose, the sixth- and seventh-grade science teacher at Rhodes, was always saying things like that. He's rumored to have exclaimed once to a classroom full of stunned eleven-year-olds: “Your wife might cheat on you, but science will never let you down!” And at the staff holiday party a few years ago, he cornered me in the hallway as I was about to leave. “Poetry!” he scoffed. “Poetry won't cure cancer!”

The wind rippled the waves. I began to feel as if Cal and I would remain here forever, that this was my perilous, desolate fate: some minnows, a goose, an American coot; strangers waving to me from the other side. There seemed to be only one way out of the muck. “Could we…leave?” I said.

Cal nodded. “Where do you want to go?”

I pretended to think for a minute. “To your house?” I tried to pull off a confident grin, but my lips twitched.

A decade flew off of Cal's face. He caught his balance as the ground shifted, and he discovered that he was standing somewhere happy and unexpected. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

In what strange, postapocalyptic world was I propositioning a man? I knew that there were women who had sex without immediately pledging their undying devotion to their partners like delusional swans. There were women who could do this. Probably lots of women. I had never been one of them.

Sex tangled up my circuits, rewired me. For one month in college, I went to movies and restaurants and parties and bars with Chad Hansen, appreciating his quiet sense of humor, his big lumberjack body, the slow way he spoke, how his meaty paw dwarfed mine when he held my hand, his extensive knowledge of venison. I liked him, although he often told me that I reminded him of Woody Allen and once suggested that his boss at the bar he worked at was trying to Jew him down. We enjoyed each other's company (for the most part), but we were foreign-exchange students to each other, with an end date stamped on our relationship.

There was a band I liked coming to Madison in early January—Charm School—and I wanted to go with Chad. But after that, I was going to break up with him. I had rehearsed my speech.
We were meant to be temporary.
I knew that. I knew it until one bitter cold night in December when we slept together.

Really, when I think about it, it happened because it was so very cold out. His landlord was stingy with the heat, so we crawled into his bed to get warm, but it was early in the evening, not time to sleep yet. The sex was slow and sweet and lingering, and afterward we were both really much less cold.

After we had sex, he lay next to me and touched my face like a sculptor, with awe. I decided right then that I loved him, Chad from Waupakakee. I would get over our differences: the way he beeped me on the nose whenever he thought I was getting too serious, how he sometimes put on headphones while I was talking, how much he loved video games that involved shooting animals, how he told me, without my asking, which specific forms of exercise would target my trouble spots. But it made sense to me. That's what sex was:
making love.

Ten months later, after a big fight (“Isabel, you don't always have to say every single thing you're thinking!”), Chad looked at me with his big, dopey blue eyes and said, “Iz, what are we
doing
?” And I woke up from my sex trance and thought,
Good God, I have no idea.

So now, with Cal, I couldn't claim ignorance. I knew there would be a cost.

The drive back to Cal's house seemed to take half the time it took to get to Lake Kass, our nervous energy like a tailwind. Cal kept trying to make sure I was comfortable, turning the heat up, then down, then off, changing the music from opera to Bob Dylan to “Darkness on the Edge of Town.”
Is this okay?
he would ask, before altering the environment again.
Better?
Okay?
I had the fleeting and uncomfortable thought that I was seeing a preview of his moves in bed. He tipped the air vent toward me, then away, one hand on the wheel, and all of his jangly vigilance made it easier for me to pretend I was the calm one, the instigator, the believer that this was no big deal.

His house was a small bungalow on a street of small almost-identical bungalows. Most of them were white or gray, with the occasional light blue or green outlier. Some of the houses were slightly nicer, built with the special kind of light-colored brick that gave Milwaukee its nickname, Cream City. Josie used to elbow me whenever she spotted a particular type of attractive local guy, the kind you could tell had grown up here: beefy, pale, sometimes sporting a mustache, and never an ounce of fashion sense, but still strangely, undeniably sexy.
Cream City,
she would say, and I marveled at her ability to turn something so neutral into something so lewd.

Cal's house was one of the nicer ones, brick, neatly landscaped, with freshly painted white trim. Its distinguishing feature was the bright orange mail slot set in the front door.

We walked up the front steps together, and he stood back as I walked in. We hadn't spoken for the last ten miles of the trip, both of us too nervous to keep the conversation going. We were two people who hardly knew each other about to reveal our flawed selves.

“Here we are,” Cal announced.

“Here we are.” I heard Hannah's voice in my head, her worldly disdain for the frailties and stupidities of adults: Here we are.
Duh.

Cal stood behind me, laid his hand on the small of my back. The nerve endings in my body migrated to where his palm rested lightly, and all I felt was the pressure. If we did this, it would mark the path toward the end for Chris and me. It would be—I knew myself; I knew this—irreversible.

I had known this man for about a day. You could get carried away by passion when you were young, and the repercussions would come later. This was different, reasoned and careful. This was a repercussion appetizer.

His front door opened into a small entryway and from there directly into the living room. The room was neat as a pin, and a study in shades of green—forest-green rug on a hardwood floor, dark green pillows carefully arranged on a nubby, oatmeal-colored sofa; moss-green wool blanket folded over a leather armchair. The house had a faint, sweet smell to it, and I couldn't quite tell if it was fresh air or cleaning product.

Everything was at right angles in the room, all of the edges sharp, the corners crisp. It was a page from
Tidy Bachelors Monthly.
I looked around to try to find any details that might have indicated that a woman had been here anytime in the past several years. And then I realized that I had no idea what I was looking for. Between Chris and me, Chris was the one who had the eye, who knew which colors softened a sunlit corner, how to drape a blanket over the side of a sofa so that it looked like an inviting place to rest. When he moved out of the house, everything that had been easy and flowing stopped and petrified a little.

Cal led me into the kitchen, and we sat down across from each other at the small, square table. The last of the afternoon sunlight angled in through the windows, soft and pinkish. In his warm, dimming kitchen, I thought I saw, for a second, exactly who Cal was: the sorrows and joys of his past linked up and settled into his features, his lined eyes, his straight nose, his lips. He was, for that moment, ageless. And in that delusion there was, maybe, the faintest fluttering of something like love.

The kitchen was unsurprisingly neat, no dishes in the sink, just one lonely white mug in the drainer, and I decided that there hadn't been a woman here in a long time, if ever. My relief was followed quickly by suspicion. Why had there not been a woman here? What was wrong with this man? The small pantry behind him was half open, the only thing amiss in the whole house so far. Four boxes of pasta were lined up next to one another on the edge of the top shelf, a herd of rotini lemmings about to jump.

Cal clasped his hands together and rested them on the table, gazing at me, and I had the odd feeling of being in a job interview.
Thank you for considering me for this position. I'm a people person! My weakness is that I am too conscientious.

“Would you like some wine?” he asked. “Or tea?” He looked around at his kitchen as if he were seeing it for the first time. “Actually, I don't have any tea,” he said.

“I'll have tea.”

He smiled, the lines around his eyes crinkling. “Isabel, if we're…well, this isn't how I normally…I don't really know how to do this.”

“Neither do I,” I said, and the air between us got a little lighter. He stood, walked behind me, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up, but he just turned on the light and sat back down. I ran the palm of my hand over the blond wood of the table, smooth as butter.

He pulled his chair in and leaned toward me. “You are very beautiful.”

“Shut the fuck up!” I said. And then I snorted.

Cal's eyebrows lifted in surprise. My whole body heated up like a convection oven, sudden and swift. I felt my cheeks go pink. Cal was a gentleman, a grown-up, and I was an idiot-child.

Helene was always telling me that I needed to learn how to accept compliments. A few weeks before Chris and I got married, she sat me down in her living room and made me practice:

You look gorgeous.

Thank you!

Your dress is so beautiful.

Oh, thank you!

You and Chris are perfect together.

Thanks, thanks, thank you so much.

It didn't stick.

Cal shook his head. “I'm sorry. I don't quite…” He shrugged, helpless. We were worlds apart. And I had rendered him speechless.

I smoothed my hair, realized it had been several hours since I'd checked my face in a mirror. I licked my lips, which were a little chapped. “So, you really like pasta, huh?” I said.

“Ah…pardon?”

I pointed to the cupboard behind him.

“Oh. Well, it's a staple.” He looked at me, a little bit desperately, and shrugged. He leaned back in his chair, his body language putting more space between us. I held on to the edge of the table and willed myself to keep looking at Cal. “I'm sorry. I think I'm kind of free-falling here.” I stood, finally. “I should probably go. I'm really sorry.” The words were a spell; I was overcome, suddenly, with remorse.

Cal eased himself up from his chair with an athletic grace I hadn't noticed in him before. He moved toward me, and then he was standing next to me, close, and he put his hand on my shoulder, just his hand. And I leaned into him, and I wished he were Chris, and he pulled me into his arms, maybe wishing I were someone else, too—Catherine or someone just like her, and I didn't know for certain, but I was pretty sure I wasn't that woman.

The gingery smell of him was stronger here in his own house, like something spicy-sweet that he cooked often, that clung to him and became part of his own scent. His cheek was rough against mine. That was the thing I had always loved most about men, a face next to mine, and no matter how recently a man had shaved, there would always be a little friction.

Cal let go, and we stood facing each other. He laid his hand on the table, near mine. “It's okay,” he said softly, with a sincerity that almost felled me. “It's okay if you want to go, but I would like it if you stayed.”