“To your husband,” I said, raising my glass. “Let him celebrate grilled marinated baby harbor seal with igneous cornmeal and conker spoonbread, heirloom cotton, roasted artisanal hen-of-the-woods, and squid-ink poblano chutney; let us eat bloody prime rib with ramekins of bouillon and horseradish sauce, a baked spud, and five limp green beans.”
“Enough,” she said.
“Just want to draw a clear distinction between him and me,” I said. “I’m not a food person. To me there’s something essentially infantile about fetishizing the act of putting strange and unfamiliar things in your mouth at every opportunity.” I swigged my scotch.
“I have a feeling you’re more like him than you’d like to think.”
“Oh, yeah?” I held up my half-empty glass. “He like to drink?”
“That one’s all yours.”
“Hey: Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Poe, Chandler, Joyce, Beckett, Lowry, Cheever, Carver, Yates. I can keep going.”
“Bravo. Now, backstroke.” She leaned back and mimed applause. “And here I thought it was just because you’re Irish.”
We ordered and ate. I ordered a bottle of red wine to go with the food and steadily refilled Kat’s glass throughout the meal. I ordered a second bottle. I got the impression that we were getting louder and louder, but I didn’t care. At one point I hooked my feet around the legs of Kat’s chair and pulled her closer and closer to the table, in shuddering, irregular stages, timed to interrupt her while she was speaking. Finally she just began to laugh, and threw her napkin at me. I smiled stupidly as I reached under the table and put my hand on her thigh and ran it up toward her crotch. She jumped, her knees hitting the underside of the table and rattling the dishes and cutlery, and then laughed. “You infant!” she exclaimed. This merited a sharp look of rebuke from a woman at a nearby table, who bottle-fed a placid newborn while keeping an eye on two well-behaved older toddlers who stood peering out the plate-glass window across the room. Her reaction made me slightly peevish. Sex is sex, lady, whether you choose life or no. Miracle bundles notwithstanding, somebody said some dirty words, somebody pulled hair, somebody came, somebody smelled their fingers afterward.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“We’re not in any shape to drive back to Cherry City.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, for about the fifth time that evening. “You watch.”
We left her car in the lot. I went through an exaggerated pantomime of opening the door of my truck for her, bowing, and helping her into the cab — once again I mentally compared my movements to those of a puppet or marionette — and then I got in and drove us down the Manitou peninsula, first along the winding roads that followed the shoreline, where I took it easy on the curves at first and then grew increasingly, recklessly confident, and then south down the relatively straight county route, where I floored the accelerator and hit ninety.
“Yes!” shouted Kat. “I wish this thing had a sunroof so I could stand up!” As she said it, we were approaching the crest of a steady incline at which point the road gently, but abruptly, veered to the left. We rocketed over the top and sailed through the air for a long free moment. Although it’s impossible that we could have had the time, I would swear that we exchanged a charged look, erotic and unafraid. We landed, jarringly, bottoming out near the right-hand shoulder and the ditch that lay beyond, and with tires shrieking I managed to pull the truck back onto the road without flipping over. I drove the rest of the way down the peninsula more slowly, and by the time I turned onto the east-west highway that connected us to Cherry City I was observing the limit.
SHE HAD A room at the Holiday Inn where I’d stayed when I first arrived in town. It felt odd, familiar in an uncomfortable way, to pull into the parking lot for the first time in months, to recall the ulcerous pang that inhabited my stomach for weeks, the feeling of loss that accompanied my abandonment of everything, the now-whatness of life. I’d really believed that I was coming to Michigan to write a book in relative peace, but when I was standing at the window of that hotel room at night looking down at the harbor lights, or driving deep into Manitou County, late, restless and panicky behind the wheel, I think I must have known that I’d come for nothing.
In the lobby, two of the clerks I’d seen every day during the weeks I stayed there were on duty at the front desk, but if either of them recognized me as we weaved past them toward the elevator, they gave no sign. I didn’t take it personally. After growing up in a town where strangers waved as they passed one another in their cars and then living for years in a city where people you knew pretended to be checking their cell phones when they passed you on the sidewalk, I was perfectly balanced between perfunctory neighborliness and mystifying rudeness. Two teenage girls got off the elevator when the doors opened. They eyed us and, without exchanging a word, began to giggle. I didn’t take that personally either. We rode up amid the sweet smell of cheap perfume and cinnamon gum.
She opened the door to her room and then stood leaning against it, waiting for me to pass.
“You going to come inside or are you just going to stand in the hall like a Bible salesman?”
I came inside and she let the door close behind us. I looked around. A large suitcase sat on the luggage rack. There was a laptop open on the desk, with a cylindrical container of nicotine lozenges and a half-full plastic cup of wine beside it. The wine bottle floated awkwardly in a plastic ice bucket filled with what was now water. On the laptop screen I saw a half-composed e-mail message, evidence of the other life far from here, all the thousands of things that I didn’t know about this woman. Did I really want this all over again? Another history, another pathology? This was the tension few humans could resist, between excitement and uncertainty, the push of one’s resistance to the unknown braided with the undeniable biological imperative. People decided on espresso machines more carefully than they chose lovers.
“That’s a big bag.” I gestured at the suitcase. “Planning on staying awhile?”
“Maybe.”
She reached for my parka and began undoing the snaps, the zipper, various flaps and cords. Despite the bulk of the garment, and the sweater and turtleneck beneath it, the gesture was persuasively seductive. I draped the parka over the back of the desk chair, she moved beside me and poured out a cup of the wine, then handed it to me. The peculiar play of accidental touching. Same as it was at the age of eight. Skin against skin, the foundation of every crude hope since the origin of time.
“Your husband know you’re thinking about staying?”
“God no.”
“But he knows something.” I looked at the bag again, pictured a corresponding set of forlornly depleted bureau drawers, empty hangers swinging on a closet rod back in Chicago. I tried to muster sympathy for him, couldn’t manage it.
“Nothing he didn’t already know.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t there.”
“You left him a note.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“He’ll call later and you’ll tell him.”
“Tell him what? He knows I’m here. He doesn’t have to know what I’m thinking about.”
“Or doing.”
“Or doing.”
“It might be better for him,” I said, “if he did.”
“My marriage doesn’t have anything to do with you,” she said. “So stop worrying about it.”
My moral reservations were winded easily, falling far behind me as I felt myself beginning to get aroused. Kat had sat down at the foot of the bed, and was leaning back to lift her right leg to remove her boot. She repeated the act with the left boot, and then reclined, supporting herself on one elbow as she reached out to take the cup of wine from me. She drank, straightening her back and pushing out her breasts, then looked at me.