He pushed End and opened the door.
“Listen,” Margaret said, “my cell’s not working and I was supposed to call Morgan at, like, two o’clock.”
“God, covering your ass,” he said. “The curse of Adam.” He handed her the phone, reached across, opened the glove compartment and took out the cigarette case. “I’ve been obsessing about that. Like they’ve figured out that they’re naked, but they’re so new at it that they can’t just act like it’s okay. And God is totally fucking with them.” He pointed a finger that trembled in wrath. “ ‘And who tooooold you you were naked, hmm?’ ”
“Why are you obsessing about that?” Margaret said.
“Trying to reread Milton,” he said. “For this alleged piece. Which reminds me—I found out the story behind the ear.”
“Really.” She snapped the phone shut. “Do tell.”
“Seems our friend used to run this honeymoon resort in the Poconos, and he was a bit of a Norman Bates? So when God found out that he was bugging the rooms—”
“Oh, fuck you, Cal.”
“He sent His fire down from heaven—”
“Not funny.”
“Ah,” he said. “If her readers could hear her now.”
—
In graduate school, Cal had played with a band called the Desecrators, whose specialty was covering Dylan songs and changing the pronouns. They’d begin sets with “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (“Take this badge off of him / He can’t use it anymore”) and close with “He and He.” Fran had majored in piano, though she’d soon given up on a concert career. She was amazed that Cal could just play with nothing written down; he was amazed that a real person could sit at a piano and out would come, say, a Chopin nocturne. He taught her to play eight-ball and to walk on the street with a can of beer in a paper bag, and he put her onto Dawn Powell years before Tim Page made a big deal out of it. He used to know Tim Page, actually, through a painter friend. And he gave her coke for the first time. The coke turned out to be not such a good idea.
When he finally got Fran to marry him, he quit the Ph.D. program and stopped playing music, like some Jane Austen lady who’d hooked a husband and no longer needed her accomplishments. He sold his guitars to come up with the two months plus a month’s security plus the fee on a three-bedroom at West End and 102nd. She got pregnant, sort of not accidentally, and they tossed a coin for whose study would be the baby’s room; she won, but gave it up anyway. Her piano students and the occasional accompanist gig hadn’t been bringing in much; he was writing a column he called Manufacturing Contempt for a weekly that people picked up for the listings and escort-service ads, plus stuff on the side for The Georgia Review. His template was Edmund Wilson. When Cammy was three, the weekly hired him as an editor, just in time for him to use his benefits for Fran’s first rehab. Now he’d taken over as number two at this online magazine, which had begun to break even; he could also write as little or as much as he wanted for a buck a word on top of his salary. He’d just bought a painting from the painter friend. His template now was James Wolcott. He could twist the knife, there was that to be said.
—
They took off their clothes, got under the covers and started a fresh joint. It was low-rent to relight a roach, like a cartoon bum smoking a cigarette butt impaled on a pin. Fran’s deal as opposed to Margaret’s was not to show her body unless they were quote being sexuaclass="underline" that was hotter in the long run, though this with Margaret was also hotter. The inside of Fran’s cunt was slickly muscular, Margaret’s more mooshy—even rubbered up, you could feel it—though you’d expect the opposite, for some reason he couldn’t articulate. Fran came louder, but Margaret more, with these fluttering contractions up inside. When he judged that she’d come enough, he started up the hill himself, got snagged thinking about the Hill Difficulty in The Pilgrim’s Progress, then broke through into the world of light.
After a long enough time for it not to seem coldhearted, he rolled away, slid the condom off and wrapped it in bedside Kleenex. Then back shoulder to shoulder, thinking up the first thing to say. Any first thing said must of necessity be stupid, yet sooner or later one or the other of them would have to break the silence. Would it not be Christ-like to take the stupidity upon himself?
“So would you have contempt for me,” he said, “if this turned out to make me a better husband?”
“What?” she said. “Oh.” She rolled onto her side, away from him. “Sorry, I’d been forgetting the context. Do you want your Zagat rating? Morgan’s in better shape than you, but you’re a little better as a fuck. More calculating, you know? Like trying to figure me out. It makes you seem mean.”
“Huh,” he said. “I would’ve thought solicitous.”
“No, mean is good,” she said.
“But at any rate,” he said, “not a mercy fuck.”
“I doubt that mercy comes into this.” She rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling. “I feel sorry for that man.”
“That man,” Cal said. “Oh—right. The guy.”
They started yet another joint and settled back on their pillows. But they’d smoked so much by now that it just wasn’t doing it. She reached over. Handled him awhile, then got her mouth down.
“Hmm,” he said. “This may be a lit-tle premature. Given that I’m no longer twenty-one. No longer forty-one.”
She popped him out, still limp—he imagined the sound of a festive champagne cork—and said, “I don’t believe in the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
By the time they got out of bed, the sun had gone down. Cal stepped onto the deck, T-shirted and barefoot, and discovered the moon, full, its never-to-be-deciphered pattern of marks, not quite a face going Ooh but not quite not. Sharp chill on his arms: you could feel all of winter compacted inside it, like a Zip file.
Back inside, he sat on the bed and picked up his socks. “So tomorrow?” he called. “Up with the lark, yes? We should look at the trails.”
“I knew it.” She came out of the bathroom. “Shit. Okay.” She sat down next to him on the bed and he unfolded the map. “I was thinking this one.” He pointed to a trail called Moose Meadow, 5.5 kilometers, marked with a blue square. A green circle means an easy trail. A blue square indicates a moderately difficult trail. A black diamond advertises the most difficult trail Ridgeline Lodge has to offer. There was a mind behind this: perhaps the mind of the ear man? Look at how they varied the verbs.
“Have you ever seen a moose?” he said.
“Of course not. Nobody has. Have you ever seen anybody die?”
He looked at her. She was looking at the map. “There’s a question,” he said. “Not actually. I saw what was supposedly the Danny Pearl video.”
“Do tell,” she said.
—
They drove back toward the town looking for somewhere to eat. The sad little strip by the Northway had a McDonald’s, a Dunkin’ Donuts and a Ponderosa. “This is grim,” she said.
“I should’ve asked our guy.” He pointed to the Ponderosa. “Okay, now when I’m president, every one of these will be required to have an Italian place next door called L’Allegro.”
They passed under the Northway. (So was she not impressed with the jeu d’esprit?) On the other side, a Stewart’s and darkness beyond. “Okay, this is hopeless,” she said. “Why don’t we just go in here and sort of forage.”