David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

Karen had called Wednesday night, out of the blue, to ask if she and Allen could come for the weekend. And would it be at all possible to pick them up in Burlington if they took a plane Friday evening? Because if they rented a car, it looked like they couldn’t possibly get there until after midnight. Not a problem, Faye told her, if they didn’t mind Paul coming to get them in the truck; the car was in the shop, and she still hadn’t learned to drive a stick.

“ A truck ?” Karen had said. “Allen will be thrilled.”

“I’m always thrilled when people are thrilled,” Faye had said. The car was in the shop because after front-end work to the tune of four hundred dollars they couldn’t afford to get it out.

Faye had never met the new husband. In the wedding pictures he looked like a pretty standard product. Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters. Well, why not. Karen had relocated to L.A. just after Faye had moved into Paul’s place on Laight Street, and she’d married Allen around the time Faye and Paul had clinked glasses at the Ear Inn to toast their plan: Paul would quit teaching and make the down payment on the farmhouse they’d found, and Faye would take that newspaper job in Burlington while he stayed home and wrote. By the time Karen talked Allen into moving back to New York, Faye and Paul had been up here for two years — during which time Faye got laid off and Paul began working for the town. Then another year just sort of went by. Faye and Paul never left Vermont, and Karen and Allen both had new jobs and couldn’t always get away on weekends. When Allen had surgery on the knee he’d damaged playing squash, Faye almost went down to lend moral support but let Karen talk her out of it. Moral support: a weird expression. Was the assumption that people’s morals needed shoring up in time of stress? Or was it moral of you to lend support? This was one of the many things that flew apart if you looked too closely.

• • •

Across the road, above the green hills, the sky had turned black. She’d better take the clothes off the line and hang them in the woodshed. Paul had offered to get her a dryer, but Faye wouldn’t have it: she was living in the country now, and she wanted that fresh smell. If he wanted to get her something, she said, he could start with a wicker clothes basket to replace that horrible green plastic one. “ A clothes basket ?” he said. Misunderstood Provider was one of Paul’s favorite roles these days. He was taking on the local accent, too, flattening certain sounds and giving others an odd depth: the a in farm was somewhere in between the a in ah and the a in hat, while the i in wife was something like the uy in Huysmans. He had learned to treat the kitchen as a living room, and to operate a chainsaw. He had his truck, which he had taken to calling his “rig,” and half a dozen adjustable caps — the fronts thin foam rubber, the backs nylon mesh — which still smelled after they’d been through the wash. To have adopted such an esthetic so convincingly was a real accomplishment for someone who knew perfectly well who Huysmans was.

She had just got the still-damp clothes safely into the woodshed when the sound of rain came up out of the silence as if somebody had turned up the volume. She walked to the open door and watched it pelt down in slanting gray lines through which waves of intensity swept back and forth; already the driveway was a pair of muddy streams running side by side with a strip of grass between. Paul would be home early: the road crew certainly couldn’t work in this.

It looked so touching, rain falling on all that green. And she liked it in the woodshed. The rough-hewn beams, the sweet wood smell. When they first moved in, she’d found a box of shotgun shells out here, on a shelf next to a can of motor oil. She brought the oil can to Paul but threw out the shells without telling him, hiding them near the bottom of a trash bag, then she’d worried for weeks that they might explode in the compactor at the transfer station. All in all, things were better up here. More coarse, yes: oafish locals sitting around her kitchen table, six-packs torn open. More coarse, less harsh — was that a meaningful distinction? New York was harsh. After her divorce from Ben, she’d moved in with Karen on East Third Street. Because she had a thing about poison, she’d vacuumed up the boric acid Karen had put out, and bought roach motels. A couple of days later she’d picked up one to check inside, and it struck her that she was looking into hell: tiny, starving creatures struggling to free themselves, or just feebly waving their antennae. Later, when she took it up with her shrink, she could see that it was explicable as a projection of her guilt and not necessarily a message from God. But at the time she’d screamed, and poor Karen had come running.

It was sometime around then that Paul had come along. Completely different from Ben, one hundred eighty degrees, which was exactly what she needed. Somebody completely right-brain, or whichever side it was that made you verbal as opposed to whatever Ben was, with a lot of books, some of them the same as hers, a novel-in-progress, a funky old Saab and a failed marriage of his own. She’d gone to hear Cynthia Ozick at the 92nd Street Y and started chatting with this man in line who was wearing a nice-smelling leather jacket; when they announced that all the tickets were sold, everybody groaned, but he shrugged and said, “Minor disappointment. I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have a drink anyway. Care to come?” Karen had been greatly in favor of Paul. “You should grab him,” she said. “ I would.” This sounded like a threat, but it turned out Karen wanted to move to California but was afraid to go unless Faye had somebody. At first it made no sense, being in bed with this bearded man whose hair didn’t smell like Ben’s, or driving around up in the country staring at the fall colors out the window of this man’s Saab.

She looked through the slanting rain at the green hills. Beyond them was the long and winding road that led to Ben’s door, in Leavenworth, Washington. Then, down at the foot of the driveway, Paul’s truck appeared, its lights on, edging close to the mailbox; she saw his arm stretch out of the window, pull open the box and reach inside. Now he gunned it up the driveway toward the house, and pulled onto the grass by the kitchen door. The wipers stopped, the headlights went out and she watched him trot into the house, hugging the mail to his chest with one hand, his other elbow shielding his head from the rain. She listened to him calling her name.

For once they got to eat in the dining room. Karen and Allen had brought four bottles of a better-than-okay California Merlot, and cheeses, olives and bread from Zabar’s; Faye made sauce with their own tomatoes, which had just started to come in, and fresh pasta with her pasta machine. Paul’s contribution was to keep the music going, though Faye thought she detected an edge of something when he put on Merle Haggard. He filled his wineglass again — they were already on bottle number three — and claimed Merle Haggard looked like King Hussein, which no one was prepared to dispute.

“Okay, Famous Look-Alikes,” Paul said. “For ten points: Mama Cass.”

“You mean think up somebody that looks like her?” Karen said.

He nodded. “Famous writer.”

“Who was Mama Cass again?” said Allen.

“Mamas and the Papas,” Karen said. “Faye used to have their album when I was in fourth grade.”

“So ten points,” said Paul. “Looks just like her. Famous, famous writer.” He glances around the table.

“Would I know this person?” Allen said.