T. Boyle - World's End

“Piccata tonight,” Lula murmured, shuffling back to her veal.

“And Mardi?” he asked after a moment.

Lula just shrugged.

He stood there a moment longer, listening to the refrigerator start up with a wheeze and gazing out on that single accusatory plate at the dining room table. On the back wall, above the sideboard, hung a murky oil of Stephanus Van Wart, heir to the patroon and first lord of Van Wart Manor, the man who’d doubled and trebled the original holdings and then doubled and trebled them again until he owned every creek and ridge, every fern, every deer and turkey and toad and thistle between the flat gray Hudson and the Connecticut border. Depeyster glanced up at the proud smirking eyes of his ancestor and found that he’d lost his appetite. “Don’t bother, Lula,” he said. “I’ll eat out.”

When Joanna finally did get home the following evening, it was late — past ten — and Depeyster was sitting before a fire in the parlor, halfheartedly poking through a biography of General Israel Putnam, the man who’d closed his ears to all appeals for clemency and hanged Edmund Palmer for a spy on Gallows Hill in August of 1777. For the second night running, the heir to Van Wart Manor had eaten a solitary meal in a clean, well-lighted booth at the Peterskill diner, and for the second night running, he was afflicted with indigestion. He was feeling pretty low in any case — frustrated over the land business, incensed with his daughter (who still hadn’t deigned to return), deeply mortified by the thought of his wife’s making a public spectacle of herself, even if it was in the remotest hinterlands. And so, as he turned at the sound of the latch to confront the spectacle of his tardy wife in her ridiculous Indian costume, he gave himself over to the huffings and puffings of a fine cleansing cathartic rage. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded, leaping to his feet and flinging the book to the floor.

Joanna was wearing the moccasins and headband she’d affected since first taking up the gauntlet in the name of Indian relief. But now, for some unfathomable reason, she’d got herself up in a ragged deerskin dress and leggings as well. The dress looked like something you’d use on the car after a heavy rain.

“No, don’t tell me — it was a costume party, right? Or is this what the fashionable demonstrator is wearing these days?” The diner’s stuffed peppers shot up his windpipe to immolate the cavity beneath his breastbone. He suppressed a belch.

Joanna said nothing. There was a peculiar look in her eyes, a look he recognized from the distant past. It was the look she used to give him when they were dating, when they were newlyweds, when they were a fecund young couple with a healthy fat-faced blossoming little daughter. She crossed the room to him, and he noticed that her hair was braided, Indian-fashion, with strips of birch bark. And then her hands were on his shoulders — he could smell her, woodsmoke, wild mint, a certain primordial musk of the outdoors that made his knees go weak — and she was asking him, in a lascivious whisper, if he’d missed her.

Missed her? She was pulling him toward her, hanging from his neck like a schoolgirl, pressing her lips with their faintest taste of wild onion and rose hips to his. Missed her? They hadn’t had sex in fifteen years and she was asking him if he’d missed her?

Fifteen years. Over that period, sex for Depeyster had been reduced to a sad series of couplings, a spilling of seed in the desert, a succession of weekends with the Miss Egthuysens of the world or with one or another of the aggressive sun-tanned lionesses he ran into at the country club bar. But never with Joanna, never with his wife. All that had ended when she’d gathered up his lotions and unguents and aphrodisiacs and thrown them in his face, when she’d torn up his love manuals and shredded his ovulation schedules, when she’d asked him if he thought she was a prize bitch for breeding and nothing more. Mardi had been five or six at the time, entering kindergarten — or was it first grade? They’d slept in separate rooms ever since.

And now here she was, probing his palate with her tongue, pushing him back on the couch, pulling him to the floor and the rug before the fire. Was she drunk? he thought vaguely as she tugged at his trousers. She lifted her dress and he saw with a thrill that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath, her breasts high and hard, not a flap or wrinkle on her, forty-three years old and supple as a coed. As she sank into him he felt transported, grateful, hopeful, his fantasy of the big freckled girl realized here on the carpet in the parlor with his own wife, and he closed his eyes and concentrated on the heir to come. Oh yes, there’d be an heir. There had to be. He’d waited so long and now … it was like something out of a fairy tale, The Patient Woodcutter, Sleeping Beauty awakened with a kiss. He gave himself over to the rhythm of it.

For her part, Joanna was doing what she had to do. Not that there wasn’t a certain nostalgic feel to the whole exercise, not that it was particularly repulsive or anything like that. She supposed she loved him, in a way, this bloodless man, her husband. He was all right — she couldn’t imagine being married to anyone else — it was just that he didn’t know how to stir her, to move her in her deepest self, didn’t know or care about love, romance, passion. He was cold, cold as something you’d find crawling up the riverbed waving its claws. He didn’t want to make love, didn’t even want to fuck — he wanted to procreate.

Well, all right. She was no Molly Bloom, but for fifteen years she’d found her romance elsewhere. And now it was necessary to do this. With her husband. Her lawful partner. Presumptive father of the child she would bear, wanted to bear.

For she hadn’t been with Indians the past two days, hadn’t been to the demonstration, hadn’t in fact left Peterskill. Indians, no. But an Indian, one Indian, yes.

It was no day for a pleasure cruise. The wind was howling down out of the Canadian wilds, it was cold enough to turn back the Vikings and the sky looked dead, caught up on the mountains like a skin stretched out to dry. Walter couldn’t feel his toes, and when he tried to relight the joint pinched in a vice grip between his thumb and forefinger, a sudden gust snuffed out the match. Three times in a row. Finally he gave up and flicked the thing into the water. He couldn’t believe it. Halloween, and already it was cold as December.

Walter turned up the collar of his denim jacket and watched a couple of ducks huddling in the lee of the boat ramp. All around him, on trailers, on cement blocks, propped up on the cracked concrete as if awaiting a second flood, were boats. Ketches, schooners, catboats and runabouts, yawls and yachts and catamarans. And then there were the boats that would never see the water again, ancient hulks rusted through in every bolt, leprous with rot, splintered and bleached and listing on their bows as if they’d been thrown ashore in a hurricane. This was the Peterskill Marina. Three blocks from Depeyster Manufacturing and just across the tracks from the crapped-over train station and the abandoned factories made of brick so old it was the color of mud. Walter was here, at two o’clock in the afternoon, on Halloween, waiting for Mardi. What could be better? she’d said when she called. I mean, going out to the ghost ships on Halloween. Neat, huh?

Neat. That was the word she’d used. Walter spat in the water and then turned to look over his shoulder for her. There were half a dozen cars in the parking lot, but none of them seemed to contain Mardi. It was funny. Here he was going out sailing with her on a day that was like a blanket for a tombstone, and he didn’t even know what kind of car she drove. He looked beyond the parking lot to the string of rust-streaked boxcars that stretched away from the station and around a corner toward the mouth of Van Wart Creek, and then up at the hills of Peterskill, a dependency of rooftops among the big ascending hummocks of trees. In the foreground, huddled in the lee of some seagoing monster with gleaming rails and curtains hung in the windows, stood his motorcycle, freshly repainted and with a new footpeg and throttle. The helmet, the one Jessica had given him, was hooked over the handlebar, and even at this distance he could make out the dull blotches where he’d scratched off the daisy decals with his penknife.