17
THURSDAY, Salteau brought in a couple of things to pass around, a dance stick and a dream catcher. The objects passed from hand to hand, the adults handling them cursorily, with artificial reverence, and the children examining them with at least some genuine interest. One kid, around four, took the dance stick and, after looking at it for a moment with intense concentration, abruptly brought it down on the head of a smaller boy, probably his brother, causing the younger kid to cry.
“I’ll scalp you!” the big boy said.
“Ryan! No!” said his mother. She turned not to the smaller boy but to Salteau. “I am so sorry.”
Salteau responded with an expansive gesture. “Anishinabe would have been better off if we’d taken a few scalps here and there.” He leaned in, addressing the adults in a stage whisper. “Present company excepted, of course.” Strained laughter. Everyone felt compelled to humor the Indian, except, I noticed, Kat, who sat across the library table from me.
I was hungover enough that I’d gotten to the library a little late, even though I’d gone to the trouble of driving. Salteau hadn’t yet begun, but for the first time my primary reason for coming wasn’t to see him. I found Kat sitting off to one side of the room at one of the “big tables,” as I’d heard them called by the kids, and I pulled out a chair opposite her and sat in it. Today she had on a gray cashmere cardigan over a soft blue jersey blouse with a scoop neck. On a slender black cord around her throat she wore a small sterling silver pendant. She wore a man’s gold ring around her left thumb. She glanced at me from behind a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, smiled I think, then gestured with her chin in Salteau’s direction, turning in her chair slightly toward him, away from me, a gesture of dismissal, and knitting her fingers together. She sat like that, unknitting her fingers from time to time to shove her hair out of her face and behind her left ear with her right hand but otherwise giving Salteau her full attention. Her notebook, a long, narrow reporter’s tablet, lay unopened on the table, a pen resting on top of it.
When Salteau had finished, she gathered up her things and left the building. I followed her outside, holding my coat in my hand.
“So how’s the piece?”
“God.” She hefted the notebook and wagged it, grimacing, an unreadable gesture.
“Not coming. You need inspiration.”
“I’m inspired to go back to the hotel and crawl into bed.”
“You want company?”
“Geezum. You’re something else, aren’t you? Or do you just think you are?”
I shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
“Good try. But I’m afraid I’m scheduled to have an argument with my husband around now.”
She meant it as a joke, but I immediately thought of Dr. Heinz and wondered nonsensically for an instant if he was counseling Kat, too.
“There’s always a husband lurking around somewhere.”
“Sounds like a man who knows.”
“I’ve tiptoed out the back way a couple of times.”
“He’s back in Chicago.”
“What’s he do? Another reporter?”
“Food writer. For the Trib.”
“A food writer in Chicago. Hmmm.”
“Don’t start.”
“That’s like being a yacht reporter in Kansas, isn’t it?”
“Just don’t.”
“Meat, meat, and more meat.”
“What the heck is a ‘yacht reporter’?”
“Come on, lunch?”
“I told you, I can’t.”
“Saving room for the mixed grill later?”
She shook her head, smiling, and then savagely shoved her hair out of her face. “I’ve got to work. Here’s my lunch.” She lifted a bag of cookies halfway out of her purse.
“Cookies?”
“More ridicule, really?”
“No, I’m a fan.”
“Well, thank you. I’m honored.”
“I was referring to the cookies.”
“Geezum.” Hand up, across, hair, down.
“There’s a lot of integrity there,” I continued. “Take Keebler, for example. Still running the show from a hollow tree in Middle Earth after like ten centuries? That takes honor. I’m sure the Chinese could bake those cookies a lot cheaper than those unionized dwarfs.”
“Elves.”
“I defer to your connoisseurship. You win.”
“Oh, yeah? What do I win?”
“Lunch.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“Things were going so well. Come on. Coffee.”
“Geezum. What’s the downside of all this persistence?”
“Aggression, drunken rages, recklessly impulsive behavior, yelling. You know. The standard gamut. Come on, catch me on a good day.”
“That’s outrageous.”
BUT THREE HOURS later we were west of Bonny Haven, entangled on the backseat of her rental Impala in an empty parking lot at the head of a trail leading up and into the dunes. The lot had been cleared of snow haphazardly and half the spaces were buried under an enormous pile of it that the plow had pushed into the shape of a hill. I had one hand under her sweater cupped around her small breast. With the other I lightly gripped the back of her head while I kissed her. The engine was idling and the heater was going full blast.
“I’m not usually in this position,” she said.
“Well, me neither. It’s pretty roomy back here, though.”
“I mean I don’t usually do this.”
“Well, that’s different, I guess.”
Not that there really had been any question of what we were going to do. We’d gotten into her car and, following my directions, she’d driven us up into Manitou, where we wound around lakes and farmland on meandering county highways. On 667 we were forced to back up when we came upon a tree that had fallen into the roadway, and that was how we’d come to make a right turn and follow the road to Noonanville, where we arrived at the bridge dividing Bonny Lake from Little Bonny Lake, both icily brilliant under the bluest of afternoon skies, and crossed it to head west toward the dunes, the highest of them, bright with snow and buff-colored patches of exposed sand, towering above the peninsula. I’d directed her to pull into the small lot on some forgotten pretext.
“Shouldn’t we make sure the exhaust pipe isn’t blocked, or something?” she said.
“We’re fine.”
“It would be really messed up if we died of carbon monoxide poisoning out here.”
“We’re not going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“Making out in a car. I can’t remember the last time.”
“In Italy secret lovers rendezvous in cars all the time. They put newspapers up in the windows.”
“Why, I wonder?”
“So people can’t see in, I guess.”
“No, dummy. Why in cars.”
“Probably they live with their parents.”
“If you tell me that you still live with your mother I’m getting out now and walking back.”
“I’m alone.”
“Kids, though, you said. And they’re with who right now?”
“Their mother.”
“In Brooklyn. So what’s going on here? Do you have some sort of arrangement?”
“Yeah, it’s called joint legal custody. It’s like those ads in the back of the TV Guide. I send money every month to buy them vaccinations, and pencils to use in their simple village schoolhouse, and every once in a while I get a personalized handwritten letter and a crayon drawing.”