The brothers scarcely spoke on the plane but it felt good to let their knees touch as they sat in adjoining seats. And it felt good in the Minneapolis airport to order cheeseburgers with ketchup and mustard and cheddar cheese. (Guy ate a salad.) The people who boarded the planes at their two stops were progressively stouter and louder and more guileless.
Ely seemed so quiet and empty after New York — it had just four thousand people and Kevin noticed that they couldn’t hear the loons calling over the lake as they did all summer. The birds had already migrated to the Gulf Coast. Snow was a couple of feet deep, and just a hundred yards from their house was a dark, tall, massive wall of delicious and nostalgic fir trees eating up all the light. Their youth was in that smell, as redolent as rosemary crushed between fingers. Their canoe trips in the summer, their portages across the rocky isthmus, their tents and campfires and instant mashed potatoes, the fish they’d caught and eaten, the musty smell of sleeping bags, the wait for Chris’s heavy breathing so that Kevin could jerk off unnoticed, the scary sound of branches cracking. (Bears? There were so few blueberries that season that the animals were dangerously hungry.)
The air was so cold now it froze the moisture inside Kevin’s nose and laid a marble hand across his forehead. Their roly-poly mother and taciturn father sat as always in the front seat of the Buick and the boys and Guy in the back. The heat was blasting in the car, the radio was tuned to a country and western station, the windshield wipers were clearing a steady accumulation of snow, their mother was full of local gossip. Her sentences were punctuated by her surprisingly high and light giggles, as if the girl she had been were imprisoned below in this oubliette of flesh. She was reeling off her small talk confidently, but every once in a while she turned around to glance at them with questioning eyes, as if she could no longer be sure of how her boys — and this handsome foreigner — were responding.
Guy wondered if he’d made a mistake coming. It all seemed as crude and hopeless as Clermont-Ferrand, though the landscape was more beautiful. Kevin was holding his hand in the darkness of the backseat, but this “coziness” of Kevin’s had become tiresome — almost as tiresome as these Midwestern pleasantries. And then Kevin had a chance of marrying a local heiress — shouldn’t he seize it? It seemed this Gunn girl wanted a sexless marriage — so he should go for it. If he gave her up for Guy and then Guy left him a month later — wouldn’t that be perverse?
He knew that Andrés would finally be getting out of prison one of these days. Andrés had ruined his life for Guy — didn’t he deserve to get Guy? Kevin was young, had a brilliant career ahead of him, whereas Andrés would have no career at all.
And Guy couldn’t get out of his mind the sight of that stiff erection pressing against his orange prison uniform. Guy withdrew his hand from Kevin’s.
Once they were in their old room, Kevin relaxed. Same old Parcheesi board. Same old childhood brass lamp with the glass chimney and a bulb that brightened when a side stem was twisted. The red Hudson Bay blanket with the big label in black letters on white fabric. The old round space heater with its heavily lashed red eye. The cedar closet that was always ten degrees colder than the room. Their old schoolbooks from high school.
Kevin and Chris took turns showering and then, hair washed and waxed and combed and doused in Canoe cologne from an old bottle in the tin medicine cabinet smelling of high school sex and heavy petting in a parked car, they went downstairs to the kitchen, where their mother was making biscuits in the narrow wood-burning oven as, on the modern electric stove, she fried up a ham steak, hash browns, and cooked apple slices. Guy was already downstairs, nodding through their mother’s monologues. It wasn’t even five yet. “Why are we eating so early?” Kevin asked.
“I thought we’d get it out of the way — aren’t you boys hungry? — because Sally Gunn is coming over for some pie and coffee.”
“Gee,” Kevin muttered, “you don’t waste any time, Mom.”
She decided to take it as a compliment. “Yessiree! That’s me: Miss Efficiency! Anyway, Sally really wants to see you boys.” She looked confidingly at Guy: “Sally is an old childhood friend of the boys. Kevin was in love with her.”
Guy wondered what he was supposed to do with this information. Americans were stiff and puritanical — and then they made these shockingly intimate confessions, as if alternating mumbling with an earsplitting blast. They never spoke in the usual quiet, discreet way.
Kevin winced and darted a glance at Guy. Guy thought that Kevin’s mother — was she called Marie? — wasn’t any more embarrassing than his own mother, and just as endearing.
During their early supper they sat at the low, almost square white wood table in the kitchen. It was still covered with the old oilcloth of their childhood, red roses printed on a tan trellis, the whole thing curling up along the edges as it had for at least the century long of their young lives. They watched TV throughout the meal, as they had for years. Guy thought the TV a particularly barbaric touch.
Sally arrived on her snowmobile, wearing a knit hat from the Andes with pigtail earflaps and a synthetic insulated jacket, red to match her cheeks.
She had her Attic beauty intact — her blue eyes, veiled and mysterious, her curved bow of a mouth, her wide face. She made no effort to talk, to act, to engage. She simply displayed her beauty as she’d always done. It was enough. Their mother turned off the TV and they all sat up and smiled and quipped with a new animation. It occurred to Kevin that years of admiring Sally had been good training for admiring Guy; he’d already grown up awestruck by great beauty. She smiled and nodded and turned her face slightly to take the light, as a model is trained not to give repeats, but she seemed to be far away, lost in another language, uncomprehending though benign, somehow “blessing” them with the wonder-working properties of her looks. When she did murmur a few courtesies she struck Kevin as fractionally coarser, as if her decision to skip college and to help out her dad here in Ely had made her not vulgar but more common. After all those evenings drinking at the Log Cabin with other locals slapping the waitress on the fanny, hee-hawing, and soaking their winter beards with beer. And her face had aged, at least there were lines around the eyes and mouth now and creasing her forehead like an egg that’s been boiled too long and has started to get tiny cracks in its perfect surface. Kevin’s father, usually so silent, perked up around Sally until their mother shooed him into the back living room. There they watched the big TV. Chris looked reluctant to leave them but eventually headed upstairs, probably to call Betty.
When he was alone with Sally and Guy, the big TV talking to itself in the other room with its insistent laugh track, Kevin watched her shrug her way slowly and deliberately out of her red coat — and there was the splendor of her big breasts cradled by a plum-colored sweater. Only she would have risked red and plum. Even back in high school she’d always seemed indifferent to what other people thought of her. Maybe because her dad was the town’s richest man, she acted as if no one else mattered. Or maybe because even then she’d reputedly dated older men and she felt superior to her gaggle of high school admirers. Now her indifference risked becoming a trait, a philosophy, something unchangeable. She’d never left Ely, though she said she’d taken an accounting course at the local community college.
Guy barely recognized this Kevin — affable, joking, full of American-style anecdotes, not reluctant to say cretinously obvious things. Guy had heard so much about “beautiful” Ely and “beautiful” Sally, but there was something depressing and a bit squalid about both of them.