T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

“Um,” the old woman grunted, narrowing her eyes as if she were deciding something. Then she rose heavily to her feet, and as he looked up in surprise and mortification, she spread her arms above him in a grand gesture. “All this,” she said, “one day is yours.”

“So what do you mean, like love and marriage and all that crap?”

Marty was staring down into his Harvey Wallbanger. It was November. Naina was at art class and he was sitting in the bar of the Bum Steer, talking about her. With Terry. Terry was just back from San Francisco and he was wearing a cowboy hat and an earring. “No,” Marty protested, “I mean she’s hot, that’s all. And she’s a great person. You’re going to like her. Really. She’s—”

“What’s her mother look like?”

Mama Vyshensky rose up before his eyes, her face dark with a five o’clock shadow, her legs like pylons, the square of her shoulders and the drift of her collapsed bosom. “What do you mean?”

Terry was drinking a mug of beer with a shot of tomato juice on the side. He took a swallow of beer, then upended the tomato juice in the mug. The stain spread like blood. “I mean, they all wind up looking like their mother. And they all want something from you.” Terry stirred the tomato beer with his forefinger and then sucked it thoughtfully. “Before you know it you got six slobbering kids, a little pink house, and you’re married to her mother.”

The thought of it made him sick. “Not me,” he said. “No way.”

Terry tilted the hat back on his head and fiddled briefly with the earring. “You living together yet?”

Marty felt his face flush. He lifted his drink and put it down again. “We talked about it,” he said finally, “like why pay rent in two places, you know? She’s living in an apartment in Yorktown and I’m still in the bungalow. But I don’t know.”

Terry was grinning at him. He leaned over and gave him a cuff on the shoulder. “You’re gone, man,” he said. “It’s all over. Birdies singing in the trees.”

Marty shrugged. He was fighting back a grin. He wanted to talk about her — he was full of her — but he was toeing a fine line here. He and Terry were both men of the world, and men of the world didn’t moon over their women. “There’s one rule,” he said, “they’ve got to love you first. And most. Right?”

“Amen,” Terry said.

They were quiet a moment, mulling over this nugget of wisdom. Marty drained his glass and ordered another. “What the hell,” Terry said, “give me another one too.”

The drinks came. They sipped meditatively. “Shit,” Terry said, “you know what? I saw your mother. At La Guardia. It was weird. I mean I’m coming in after six months out there and I get off the plane and there’s your mother.”

“Who was she with?”

“I don’t know. Some skinny old white-haired dude with a string tie and a suit. She said hello to me and I shook the guy’s hand. They were going to Bermuda, I think she said.”

Marty said nothing. He sipped at his drink. “She’s a bitch,” he said finally.

“Yeah,” Terry said, reprising the ceremony of the beer and the tomato juice, “whatever. But listen,” turning to him now, his face lit beneath the brim of his ten-gallon hat, “let me tell you about San Francisco — I mean that’s where it’s really happening.”

In January, a month after he’d watched her part the frigid waters of the Hudson, the subject of living arrangements came up again. She’d cooked for him, a tomato-and-noodle dish she called spaghetti but that was pure Kiev in flavor, texture, and appearance — which is not to say it was bad, just that it wasn’t spaghetti as he knew it. He had three helpings, then he built a fire and they lay on the sofa together. “You know, this is crazy,” she said in her softest voice, the one with the slight catch to it.

It had been a long day — he was in his first year of teaching, Special Ed, and the kids had been wild. They’d sawed the oak handles off the tools in shop class and chucked stones at the schoolbus during lunch break. He was drowsy. “Hm?” was all the response he could manage.

Her voice purred in his ear. “Spending all my time here; I mean, half my clothes here and half at my place. It’s crazy.”

He said nothing, but his eyes were open.

She was silent too. A log shifted in the fireplace. “It’s just such a waste, is all,” she said finally. “The rent alone, not to mention gas and wear and tear on my car…”

He got up to poke the fire, his back to her. “Terry’s going back to the West Coast this summer. He wants me to go along. For a vacation. I mean, I’ve never seen it.”

“So what does that mean?” she said.

He poked the fire.

“You know I can’t go,” she said after a moment. “I’ve got courses to take at New Paltz. You know that, right?”

He felt guilty. He looked guilty. He shrugged.

Later, he made Irish coffee, heavy on sugar, cream, and whiskey. She was curled up in the corner of the sofa, her legs bare, feet tucked under her. She was spending the night.

The wind had come up and sleet began to rattle the windows. He brought the coffee to her, sat beside her and took her hand. It was then that the picture of her perched at the edge of the snowy dock came back to him. “Tell me again,” he said, “about the water, how it felt.”

“Hm?”

“You know, with the Polar Bear Club?”

He watched her slow smile, watched the snowy afternoon seep back into her eyes. “Oh, that — I’ve been doing it since I was three. It’s nothing. I don’t even think about it.” She looked past him, staring into the flames. “You won’t believe this, but it’s not that cold — almost the opposite.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I won’t.”

“No, really,” she insisted, looking him full in the face now. She paused, shrugged, took a sip of her coffee. “It depends on your frame of mind, I guess.”

At the end of June, just before he left for San Francisco, they took a trip together. He’d heard about a fishing camp in northern Quebec, a place called Chibougamau, where pike and walleye attacked you in the boat. There were Eskimos there, or near there, anyway. And the last four hours of driving was on dirt roads.

She had no affection for pike or walleye either, but this was their vacation, their last chance to be together for a while. She smiled her quiet smile and packed her bag. They spent one night in Montreal and then drove the rest of the way the following day. When they got there — low hills, a scattering of crude cabins, and a river as raw and hard as metal — Marty was so excited his hands trembled on the wheel. “I want to fish,” he said to the guide who greeted them.

The guide was in his forties, hard-looking, with a scar that ran in a white ridge from his ear to his Adam’s apple. He was dressed in rubber knee boots, jeans, and a lumberjack shirt. “Hi” and “thank you” was about all the English he could manage. He gestured toward the near cabin.

“Ours?” Marty said, pointing first to Naina and then himself.

The guide nodded.

Marty looked up at the sun; it squatted on the horizon, bloated and misshapen.

“Listen, Naina,” he said, “honey, would you mind if…I mean, I’m dying to wet my line and since we’re paying for today and all—”

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll unpack. Have fun.” She grinned at the guide. The guide grinned back.

A moment later, Marty was out on the river, experimentally manning the oars while the guide stood in the bow, discoursing on technique. Marty tried to listen, but French had never been his strong suit; in the next instant the guide cast a lure ahead of them and immediately connected with a fish that bent the rod double. Marty pulled at the oars, and the guide, fighting his fish, said something over his shoulder. This time, though, the guide’s face was alive with urgency and the something came in an angry rush, as if he were cursing. Pull harder? Marty thought. Is that what he wants?