Patrice fixed him with a look. 'Getting laid the caring way?'
The boy flushed. By the time she got to the car Patrice was vermilion with self-dislike, but a voice inside was still jabbering. It just wasn't fair. Someone kills themselves skiing — after choosing to slide down a mountain on slippery sticks, in other words — and it's a tragedy. If someone gets lung cancer then it's 'Well it's your own fault, you me-murdering smoker shit.' Even his widow is implicated — she could have stopped him, surely? Did she just not care enough? — and the loss is compromised by shame. We search for fault because it lets God off the hook, and without Him we don't know where to turn.
Patrice knew all about fault. It was Patrice who had killed her husband, after all.
Five years before they came north, Bill buckled under the Zeitgeist and gave up smoking. He found it hard, tough as hell in fact, but he stuck with it. Five months later they found themselves on the deck of the bar in Verona. They'd had a lovely day. A good meal was in prospect. As they sat with the balcony to themselves and the sun going down, everything was pretty perfect. They chatted, and they smiled, and they looked out over the inlet. Everything was fine, but it wasn't right, and Patrice watched Bill and knew he was dully accepting that some of his most pleasurable moments were now minor ordeals — the ordeal of missed pleasure, which is what we have in the West instead of pain.
And so she reached into her bag and pulled out something she'd bought at the market up in Cannon Beach that morning. It hadn't been a foregone conclusion, but now she'd watched his face she didn't know what else to do. She put the pack of cigarettes on the table.
He looked at the pack, and smiled wistfully, as if shown a photograph of a good friend who'd died eight months before.
He leaned forward, and kissed her.
He didn't have one that evening. But the next night, he did.
The pack lasted a whole month. There was no way of telling whether the cigarette which sparked off the cancer came from it, or the others which followed. But being human, you assume it came from the one she gave him, or at least could have done. We paint those lines, make those connections, open our hearts up to blame; we believe it rains because we are bad. In the remaining years he was never more than an occasional smoker, and he was certainly a lot happier. Maybe the cigarettes had nothing to do with it. Plenty of my-body-is-a-temple merchants get whacked with the tumour stick too. That's the thing with death: you just don't know. You never know what you should or shouldn't do or have done until it's too late — and actually, you don't know then either. It's all a great big game of truth or consequences, only there's no truth, only consequences. Truth is a fiction we backfill to make some circumstance seem less awful, more explicable, or someone's fault — even if it has to be our own.
She didn't think about that pack of cigarettes often, but when she did it wasn't long before another thought came to mind; came to ask her whether she'd bought that pack for Bill after all, or whether it had been more to do with her not wanting her precious Verona time to be spoilt by the knowledge that he wasn't as happy as he could be. The only thing that made those moments possible to bear was the certain knowledge that Bill wouldn't have minded even if the latter had been true. He had loved her that much. Then he'd died.
For a time, after a few months, it felt as if things were easing a bit. It soon became clear, however, that this was merely the calm before the storm. She started to slip, badly. Days began to get harder, longer.
Then, one long December night in 2002 as she approached her first Christmas without him, something burst in her head. She owned a CD of his favourite tracks, chosen by him to be played at his funeral back down in Portland. Songs she'd loved with him, classical pieces she'd never heard but which he evidently held dear in that part which was separate; that part that pre-dated them and had now gone on without her. She hadn't listened to the CD since the funeral. That night she put it on for the second time, listened right the way through. She found a huge bottle of scotch Bill had left behind, and drank it all. She had never done anything remotely like it in her entire life.
Midnight found her staggering in the trees outside, hair whipped by a cold gale, barefoot and nearly insensible. She had talked and she had screamed and snarled and she had cried. Her throat was torn and dry. She had left the door to the house open, and it was thwacking in the wind, way behind her. She didn't feel foolish. She felt like tearing out the eyes of everyone in the world. She felt like finding someone, anyone, and bashing their brains out with a rock. She was caught up in a whirling cloud of horror, and that night she knew she had cut through to the centre of everything. The centre, the truth, was this:
Hell is being alive, and being alive is all there is.
To kill herself would be to give in. Death's gang is bigger and tougher than anyone else's. Always has been, and always will be. Death's the man, there's no question, but she wasn't going to be on his side. So who else? It was impossible to take God seriously any more. She was sick of making excuses for the senile old shit, helping him out of his endless scrapes, patching and mending his appalling record of capriciousness. God was gone for her, but Death wasn't getting her for a sunbeam either.
Faced with this, she made a decision as she stood howling on the edge of a cold, cold lake, still swigging from the bottle of her dead husband's drink. She wasn't, in what she understood to be the popular parlance, going to be anyone's bitch no more. She would owe no allegiance to anyone or anything. No person, no god, no idea, no truth, no promise. Nothing was worth it, nothing could be trusted. There had been Bill. Now there was nothing.
But then two weeks later she had found something, something in the forest; or it had found her; and she changed her mind.
— «» — «» — «»—
The sky was dark now, and the lake looked like a sheet of black marble. It was cold. It was time to go back inside. She sat a little longer, however, because she loved this view and she feared things were about to change. She feared that though the men had gone, they would come back, and that she might be forced to defend the only thing she really cared about.
So be it.
22
We had holed up in the Morisa, a hunk of faded grandeur near the centre of Fresno. The hotel looked like it had been built to withstand sustained bombing. We liked that about it. We arrived in town late the previous night and decided not to drive any further. Until we had a plan, and somewhere in particular to go, we could be heading in one of many wrong directions. We went to the desk separately and booked rooms on different floors and went upstairs and went to sleep. Early next day we walked out into the downtown. We walked and we walked but couldn't work out where to go or what to do. There's something very alienating about stores when you have no interest in shopping. Who are these people? What are they buying, and why? They seem no less weird and irrelevant than the boarded-up fronts or the graffiti-strewn alleyways between abandoned warehouses. Weirdly, I thought I saw some letters I recognized on a door down one of these, but closer inspection showed the second letter was a 'B', not an 'R'. I think. I'm not sure. I was feeling pretty paranoid.
Late morning had found us back in my hotel room. The room was not large and had not been decorated recently. I sat in the chair. She sat on the bed. We drank the coffee when it arrived.
Nina was regretting leaving LA. She wanted to go back. I wouldn't let her. I understood that it felt like running away — it was running away. She had a job, too, even if she'd currently been asked not to do it. For her to be in this position because of a relationship to a man (and a relationship that was finished, moreover) was the kind of thing that would piss any woman off. Nina wasn't just any woman, either. She had ire in depth. She was so furious at Zandt having lied to her that she wouldn't turn her phone back on. I tried calling him, a few times, but never got anything more than the same old robotic voice telling me the phone was off. He could be anywhere in the country, doing God knows what — or in serious trouble. For all we knew, he could be dead.