Northwest Corner (10 page)

“Let him go.”

She turns: Dwight behind her, still naked. Though the expression of the triumphant sex stud he was wearing a few minutes earlier is gone. He is defeated, she sees. He has now the face of the caught-out liar.

SAM

H
E DRIVES
his father’s car in the only direction he can think of in this country not his own, fifteen minutes south. No plans on a Saturday night, no road map,
nada
. Missing especially at this moment, blindly crossing out of the unincorporated township of Arenas and into the city of Santa Barbara, the green road signs with the little maps outlined in white that mark the Northwest Corner like so many coming-home flags, telling you which town you’ve just left and which you’ve just entered: Salisbury, Box Corner, Canaan, Wyndham Falls, Bow Mills …

Native tattoos under his skin that he’s never felt compelled to acknowledge till now, probably because he’s never felt so far from home.

He parks on the main drag, if that’s what it is, not far from the marina. Sounds of voices and music from restaurants and bars down the street, storefronts open to the balmy weather like undefended faces—and so, again, nothing like home. He turns the other way and walks across a thin strip of park toward the piers. High up in the palms a breeze rustles, a whisper too exotic to be true; and ahead, keeping their own rhythm, beneath anchor lights dotting the near horizon like roped constellations, halyards bang with faint urgency against a hundred masts or more.

All this he can hear, but not believe in. Pictures and sounds will never be enough; he must always come armed with his own theory of emotional relativity, awaiting impossible confirmation. He can’t remember a time, for instance, when it didn’t seem to him, down deep, a factual certainty that his father’s fist once struck his five-year-old
face simply because, at a precocious age, for some reason not of his understanding, his face, needing to meet that fist, arranged for it to happen. That he will never be able to prove this does not make it false.

He walks the piers, one after the other. Some boats are party boats with convivial gatherings on deck, coolers of beer, here and there a blender coughing up daiquiris and margaritas. He is a sentry or night watchman or resident Batman: the drunk look at him soberly as he passes. Other boats are dark. He stands by the dark ones, peering into their lightless cabins, the vessels shifting restlessly on the invisible tide. A hundred feet behind him, above the marine shop, a bar-and-clam shack spills life over the docks, the yellow light catching in acid-colored pools on the oil-slicked surface of the water. It is beautiful, and it makes him close to seasick. He feels the need to sit down. Near the chest-high metal gate that separates the nautical or would-be nautical population from the rest, under a low-wattage municipal light peppered with suicidal moths, he finds a bench partially occupied by an old man in a crushed captain’s hat and dirty Bermuda shorts. The man nods at him blurrily, drinking a pint of something from a brown paper bag. Sam sits down, leaving some space between them. He can smell what’s in the bottle now, or maybe it’s the man’s breath: Jack Daniel’s.
With a shot of J.D. this time
, he thinks. And Nic Bellic lies slumped on the filthy floor of O’Doul’s; and Nic Bellic rises again like Lazarus or Frankenstein; and Sam watches with lacerating clarity as a gleaming scalpel blade trails a ruby cut line across the fish-white belly of a man named Nic Bellic. And he says good night to his seated American neighbor, the man in the crushed hat, and gets up and walks toward the marine shop, which is closed, and the wooden stairs that lead up to Captain Cook’s, which beckon infinitely. In a minute he will climb those stairs, and take a seat at the bar, where no one will know him and there will be everything visible to remind him of where he’s been.

DWIGHT

“I
T COMES DOWN TO TRUST,
” Penny says, not meeting my eyes as she sets a mug of coffee—my fourth of the morning—in front of me. She’s looking pretty and fit in tennis whites, but otherwise as hard and cool as a Greek statue. I’m seated at what used to be her former husband Darryl’s place at the kitchen counter, precariously perched on a high stool, no more in control of the situation than a man trying to ride an emu.

“I agree with you, Pen.”

“I was looking at him last night, the son you almost never mention and who I had no reason whatever to believe was in town. In your house. A lot of history there—I could feel it without any help from you. And you know what? You’re hardly better than a liar. I’ve realized that I don’t really know you at all.”

“That’s not true. You know more about me than anybody else around here.”

“Which isn’t saying a whole lot.”

“I don’t know, but if you were me—”

“If I were
you
?” Penny leans into the counter till she’s inches from my face, her hazel eyes moist but on fire. “If I were you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I wouldn’t be committed enough or brave enough or engaged enough to actually tell you, another person with another person’s needs and feelings, what I really think. What I care about. What the real story is. What I’m just willing to—just to, to bring to the fucking table of human relations.”

“Point taken.”

“It isn’t a point, you asshole.” Her eyes well up and she pivots and walks to the sink, where a pile of dirty breakfast dishes can be seen tilting toward the coast. I think she’s going to say more, but instead she turns on the faucet. A squirt of soap on a sponge, and she begins to scrub plates and load the dishwasher.

I’ve been gripping my mug too tightly, and I see now that I’ve spilled some coffee on the counter: another stain.

I set the mug down, get up and go to the sink, and put my arms around her from behind. I can feel myself getting hard before I even touch her.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur in her ear.

She smacks the single-lever faucet and the water shuts off. “Move.”

I step well back as she transfers a heavy skillet from sink to dishwasher. Historically, pots and pans in the hands of aggrieved women are not my friends, and by the time Penny’s added detergent and switched on the machine my nascent erection isn’t even a memory.

She turns to face me, drying her hands on a dish towel. Her eyes are no longer moist. It is in fact hard to imagine that we’ve ever fucked or had coffee in the mornings like a couple that doesn’t need language to know a few important things about each other.

“Pen, listen—”

“I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me, Dwight. Probably had me wrong from the start.”

Her tone is so realized and final it’s hard to recover. The dishwasher kicks into a higher gear, then turns eerily hushed. Just to have something to do, I retreat back to the counter and my abandoned coffee mug—but, even as I move, a small sac of despair is leaking inside my chest, which mystifies and frightens me. It’s unclear whether this feeling has to do with Penny, or with myself, or with this sunny California morning that seems already to presage another dead-end journey.

“What happened to you?” she demands. “That’s what I woke up this morning asking myself. Why the hell are you like this?”

I taste the coffee again and it’s cold. I carry the mug to the sink and rinse it out.

PENNY

S
HE DRAGS HER HEART
with her onto the tennis court, the UCSB courts, which it is her privilege as faculty to use when she’s so inclined—her daughter, too, when the little tart-tongued sprite can be bothered. And there, if you’ve nothing better to do on a Sunday morning, you might observe her taking her romantic frustrations out on her own flesh and blood, whipping forehands and two-fisted backhands from corner to corner, dropping Wimbledonian touch shots just over the net, wristing ungettable topspin lobs over the head of the strong-willed but vertically challenged juvenile whenever the impulse strikes. Honestly, where is Child Services? Are there no protections for the young? She should be hauled in and booked, fitted with one of those white-collar security anklets.

Ali watches another lob arc over her head, land fair, and, torqued with spin, rocket beyond reach. Her feet never move.

Game, set, match.

Congratulations, Professor Jacobs! You’ve just demolished your adolescent child, whose proper idea of sport is throwing herself into the Columbus Day sale at Abercrombie & Fitch
.

Mother and daughter stand on the court regarding each other. Mother already beginning to look a bit sheepish.

Let’s go to the videotape, shall we: mother mumbles generic apology for deranged on-court behavior, which said apology daughter chooses to ignore; daughter walks to sideline, takes paperback of Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials
trilogy out of backpack, sits down on the hard ground, and begins to read.

Take that, Mom, you bitch.

Mom stands wiping perspiration from face with towel, watching daughter immediately sucked into better, fuller alternative universe, to which Mom herself wouldn’t mind being transported, though she knows she wouldn’t deserve the pleasure. Which leads her to the sadly inevitable conclusion that, despite the impressive plaque on her office door, she is an authority on precisely nothing. Leads her to consider possible means of escape. Leads her to say aloud to daughter, “Will you be okay alone for fifteen minutes? I need to check my office for something.” Though this is quite baldly a fiction; there is no something awaiting her, only silence, that simulacrum of peace. Daughter, in any case, doesn’t bother to respond.

Mom hesitates, then begins walking away from maternal crime scene, thinking, in clichéd aphoristic fashion that ultimately depresses her further for its lack of originality:
Another day, another disaster
.

Thinking:
I hate you, Mr. Pullman. Thank you, Mr. Pullman
.

Thinking:
My heart is sore and frightened because of a man who is a man who is a man
.

EMMA

T
HIS SHE REMEMBERS EXACTLY:
on freshman moving-in day at Yale, her father waiting for her outside Durfee, on Old Campus.

She has seen him only once since his move to Chicago, a weekend visit to his new city that, they both afterward agreed, though it had been a while in coming, had yet somehow arrived too soon. They were not ready. Now she embraces him carefully, not sure what she will feel. This is habitual, but also encouraged by his appearance. He has lost weight, is slender as an immigrant. His beard is gone, his thick salt-and-pepper hair shaved close to the head. His glasses are different—severe black frames, in the manner of the Jewish intellectuals of his parents’ generation, whom he once told his daughter he had turned his back on.

He smiles tightly, opens his arms. “You didn’t think I was going to let you do this all by yourself, did you?”

He is speaking to her, but he might just as easily be speaking to her mother, who has stopped, in rebellion or shock, a few yards from the car, a box of books in her arms.

“Hello, Grace.”

“Ethan. I had no idea you were coming.” A sharp look at Emma. “Did you invite him?”

The answer is negative, but Emma says nothing, neither nods nor shakes her head.

Her mother marches forward slowly, eyes on the ground, as if suddenly mistrustful of her footing. She lightly bumps Emma’s father in the chest with the box of books, holds it there until he takes the weight from her.

“Since you’re here,” she says, and returns to the car for another load.

At Frank Pepe Pizzeria, crowded in by other freshmen and their families, the three of them share a large vegetarian pie and a carafe of the house red. The lunch, ostensibly celebratory, is laborious to the point of absurdity. Her mother’s manners are too perfect, sharp as the saw-wheeled pizza cutter that rests on their table like the symbol of an amputation none of them dare acknowledge.

“Another piece, Ethan …?”

Her father has drunk most of the wine. He cleans his glasses with his napkin too many times, and he begins to perspire.

“I’m afraid I’d better start thinking about getting to the airport.”

Emma looks from one parent to the other, a sickness rising in her throat. This is what it is like to know you are not forgiven.

DWIGHT

“S
O?”
I
SAY
.

Sam and I two beers deep apiece at Loney’s, a pubby sort of eatery I frequent largely because, with its satellite-TV subscription to Red Sox Nation, it reminds me a little of home. Not that this is necessarily a plus; but it needn’t be damning, either. It was my hope that Sam might appreciate it, too, for not dissimilar reasons.

Unfortunately, with the Sox-Angels game already started on the wide-screen above the bar, and the room three-quarters empty, the ambience seems instead to have raised up our ghosts, the lost years and meals and the rest, the evenings not like this one.

“So?” Sam repeats.

“Do you have a problem with anger?”

“Do I have a problem with anger?” A rippling smirk breaks the surface—my son, like his old man, no rank amateur: he can tell his mimic job is starting to get under my skin. “A problem like yours, you mean?”

“I don’t have that problem anymore, Sam. I have other problems now, which we can talk about later, if you’re really interested. How about right now you just answer the question.”

“I’ll answer it after you,
Dad.
”

“Okay. I don’t have a clue. Last time I saw you, you were this little muffin of a kid struggling under a whole lot of stuff no kid should ever have to deal with. A pretty gutsy kid, in my opinion—a good kid. You’d had some tough luck in the old man department, okay, but you weren’t clubbing anybody with a baseball bat.”

“Everybody grows up eventually,” Sam mutters darkly, eyes glued to the TV above my shoulder.

The quiet bitterness of this remark sets me back in my chair. I reach for my glass, but it’s empty.

And time seems to stop then, or even goes into reverse, as I look at the angry young man sitting across from me, unable, however I study him, to find evidence of the thin white scar that I know runs along the line of his left jaw: the scar made by my fist when, five years old, he jumped into the middle of a drunken fight I was having with Ruth on the night our marriage went bust. Every single second of that night was, for all of us, an accident of the worst kind. Just like that, because of me, his life—and mine—swerved off course. Though the still worse turns that were to follow didn’t immediately make themselves known—as, of course, they never do, until it’s too late.