Like a hospital room.
“Now I’m thinking something warmer: terra-cotta tile, plants, big old tub.”
“Did you and Dornan…” I didn’t finish the question. I had no idea why I’d begun it.
“Talk about setting up house? No. He wanted to but he never brought it up. I’d have run a mile. Did you and Julia?”
“No. It…” I shook my head. “No. It seemed so obvious we’d spend the rest of our lives together that we didn’t even discuss it.”
“So, you would have got back from Norway and argued about bathroom furniture.”
I picked up the catalogue and traced the picture of the tub with my finger. “She might not have liked this.”
“Who would have won?” Tammy was smiling, and just for a moment my memories of Julia were happy ones—watching her face in the Oslo art gallery as she explained Norwegian neo-Romanticism; pulling her to me when I was in the tub; frying freshly caught fish—free of a hovering sense of doom, free of guilt, free of anything but happiness, and I was able to smile back.
“She would.”
“You want more coffee?”
I didn’t, there was still the hardware store and Radio Shack to visit and the fixtures to load, but the sense of lightness and gladness, of being able to remember Julia without guilt, persisted, on and off, all afternoon: the perfect birthday gift.
I took another sip of the Woodward Canyon Reserve chardonnay—Tammy’s choice; mine was rioja—and its smoky oak flavor distracted me for a minute from what the man standing opposite me near the fireplace was saying. His name was Henry something or other, an old-fashioned name for a man wearing aggressively fashionable glasses, slits that didn’t seem big enough to see through.
“… those days, not like Adrian”—Dree’s mother—“and the rest of us.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Not as long as the women’s land collective. I came in ’79. We started with nothing, not even common sense.” He smiled as if to say, You know what it’s like to be young and foolish, and I realized that I had not thought about Karp or New York for at least an hour.
“So how do you know Adrian?”
“Oh, I’ve known of her for about twenty years, but she and the others were rabid lesbian separatists until the mid-eighties.” He gave the woman sitting on the tapestried couch on the other side of the room an affectionate look. Adrian was in her mid-fifties; her hand rested on the thigh of a man who appeared to be ten years her junior, and the looks they exchanged were frankly sexual. Now I understood Dree thinking her mother was getting, like, weird. “She’s changed a lot then?”
“We all have.”
There were about fifty people at the party, ranging in age from early sixties to early twenties, the older crowd’s children. The atmosphere was one of village get-together: people who had known each other for decades, and been through economic, political, and emotional change. I tried to imagine them in tie-dye and beards, or working naked on the land, getting stoned and talking about the power of the patriarchal military-industrial complex, but all I could see were accountants and psychotherapists, the sons and daughters of middle America finally leading the kind of lives their parents would at least have understood, if not wholly approved. For that there would have to have been more wedding rings, more socks, and some meat among the Brie and smoked salmon and vegetable dip in the dining room.
I excused myself, and refilled my glass. Tammy stood to the right of Adrian’s couch, talking to a man and woman in their twenties who were hand in hand. The man’s blue eyes seemed vaguely familiar. I watched Tammy for a while; she wasn’t touching the man on the arm, or giving him extra big smiles, or arching her back so that her breasts pressed against her thin sweater; she wasn’t canting her hips and shoulders so that the woman was cut out of the conversation; she wasn’t just a couple of inches too close. I stepped forward and she saw me.
“Aud!” She opened the circle. “This is Shari, and Ken, Dree’s brother.” That explained the eyes. I swapped my wine to my left hand and we exchanged handshakes and pleased-to-meet-you’s. “Ken works for a construction company—”
“McCann, right?”
He smiled. “How did you know that?”
I pointed to my haircut. “Dree.”
He smiled some more, but I saw how his hand stiffened in Shari’s and thought he must get tired of Dree talking about him and his affairs to all and sundry.
“Like I was saying, Ken works for a construction company. I told him about the cabin and what kind of stove we were looking for, and he thinks he knows where we can find one. I told him we’d already tried that place on Merrimon.”
Since when had there been a we?
“Tammy tells us you want something you can cook with,” Shari said. She had long, honey-colored hair and beautifully shaped nails. “Maybe a wood-burning range is the way to go.”
“Just a plain stove,” I said. “Something along the lines of an old Intrepid, that’ll heat the cabin—”
“—and boil a pan of water if necessary.” Now Ken’s smile was real. “We had one of those our first couple years up the mountain. That’s all we had. Wonderful thing. Dree was just starting to crawl. I was seven. It was my job, while Mom was in endless collective meetings, to make sure Dree didn’t stick her hand on it. Those puppies get hot when they’re going! Wonder what happened to it.” He literally shook himself, like a dog trying to get dry. “There are a couple places along Emma Road you might try. They supply me when I do independent contracting. Tell them I sent you and they might give you a discount.”
“I will. But I don’t know your last name.”
“Johnson.”
Son of John. “Bet Adrian didn’t like that.”
He grinned. “She changed our names to Moon for a while after she left Dad and dragged us up here, but never got around to making it legal, so at school Dree and I were always Johnson, and it just crept back. How about you? You sound British.”
“Norwegian. Aud Torvingen.”
Shari’s mother, it turned out, was originally from Denmark. Shari had visited Copenhagen for the first time last year. Wonderful city. Did I know it?
At midnight, we were the only vehicle on the road.
“I liked that,” Tammy said.
“Good.”
“Did you?”
I thought about it. “Yes.”
“I liked it a lot,” she said. “I liked the people, the way it felt. It must be cool to live with people you’ve known for twenty or thirty years, to work in the same town where people went to school with your parents. Wonder what that feels like.”
Stifling, probably.
She said wistfully, “They seemed like a real community.”
“I didn’t know you yearned for community.”
“It just seemed… I don’t know. Nice. Like they were really in each other’s lives. It wasn’t just that they all belonged to the same gym or something. They’ve got history together. These people know each other: they remember when which kid had what illness, when who split up with who in junior high and why. Ken told me stories about how they had to share everything the first few years. How they still do, sort of. They grew up together. I can’t even remember the names of people I went to college with.”
A community of necessity and proximity would probably drive her screaming into the sunset. “Most real community comes from shared hardship.”
“Still. I think I could live here.”
If it hadn’t been such a narrow road, and dark, I would have turned to look at her. “I wouldn’t have thought there were a lot of business development opportunities here.”
“Now that’s where you’re wrong. Asheville is hot. Did you meet Jonas? Tall guy, gangly, beaky nose? He’s a VP at Sonopress, and he was saying that the company gives money to the town, for stuff like the annual Bele Chere festival, and WCQS, and the local Arts Alliance, but that they want to do more, give the company a higher profile in the community. It sounds like a job I could do: get to know people, find out what people want, find a way to give it to them so everyone’s happy.”