Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

I now understand that rape is more often than not a domestic matter, but I had been deeply confused when, after pressuring my wife relentlessly, she told me that the rapist was a close friend of her father’s. I had staked all my understanding on increasingly elaborate and far-fetched horrors, but the dark stranger I had been improvising was a grotesque cliché. She had been raped here, in this cabin, on her annual trip up north. My desire to know more — I wanted his name, I wanted her to say it — was met with a steady resistance, an intricate system of refusals, with the result that, constantly sparring, skirmishing, denying, we were never very deeply honest with each other. Caroline was resolute. She wouldn’t talk about it, except to say that the truth would kill her father. “He wouldn’t be able to take it,” she said. I had never been up north, refusing until now to make the annual trip.

This is not easy for me to say, so I’ll start with the clinical by saying that Caroline was anorgasmic: she’d never had a climax, not with me or anyone else, not even by herself. Like many other men before me, I believed that I would remedy that problem, that it was merely a matter of prowess and patience, of a deeper love and a greater persistence, but no matter what we did — the books, the scents, the oils, all the hoodoo of love — none of it changed a thing. With time, my conceit broke down. In defeat I came to feel weak and ashamed. In some way, her lack of sexual fulfillment accounted for her promiscuity: what she missed in intensity she made up for in scope. She had never been a faithful lover, either before or after our marriage; she preferred sex with strangers, which I could never be, not again. It was as if she were determined to revisit, over and over, that original moment of absolute strangeness. And yet she continued to need the scrim of familiarity I offered, so that the world would fill more sharply with the unfamiliar. Daily I lost more and more of my status as a stranger, and our marriage was like a constant halving of the distance, without ever arriving at the moment in time where, utterly familiar, I’d vanish.

Caroline was currently having an affair with a talent agent, a man from London who, roughly a month ago, had begun to make regular appearances in her diary and date book as SJ. In her Filofax: “Lunch w/ SJ”; “SJ for drinks.” A page with his home number, then his address scribbled on the square for October 23. (Before SJ, there’d been an M, a D, a G. She always used initials, some nicety of convention she must have come across in adolescence.) I had, of course, taken to reading her diary, hoping it contained some sort of truth. I’d read the most recent entry as I read all of them, at three in the morning, crouched on the side of the tub in our tiny bathroom, in terror of being discovered, my skin blue and bloodless under the frank fluorescent light. In that entry she considers whether she should go with SJ, the week after Thanksgiving, to his house in Vermont, telling me — what? she wonders. That she’s landed a part in a commercial shoot that will take her overnight to Boston? What part? And what commercial? she asks herself, plotting for the plausible, the approximate, some arrangement of words that would deceive and soothe and sound, recognizably, like our life.

The truck was loaded and we were off before dawn, while the women still slept. The sky was slate blue and brittle, and at one point I saw the green flare of a meteor burn out above a line of trees. It happened so fast that I doubted myself in the very moment of wonder, and, feeling sleepy and uncertain, decided not to mention it to anybody. I imagined that a kind of fraternal ridicule kept this group cohesive, and I didn’t want to become the scapegoat who helped them bond.

Mr. Jansen stopped for coffee at a filling station, where trucks and cars idled in the raw air, their headlamps lighting the tiny lot. Hunters were already heading back to the city with their kills. Nearly every car was tricked out with a carcass — a six-point buck strapped to the roof of a yellow Cadillac, the head of a doe lolling beneath the lid of a half-closed trunk.

Steve reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He tapped a few loose and, turning to me, said, “Smoke?”

“Can’t you wait?” Lindy said.

“I’ll crack the window.”

“Fuck, just wait.”

“No, thanks,” I said, waving away the offer.

Steve had been the first up that morning, and he’d taken the time to shave. His red jowly face was smooth and smelled of lime. Below his ear a spot of blood had dried where he’d nicked himself. I’ve never really liked men on whom I can smell cosmetic products, and it was that morning, in the truck, so close to Steve, that I realized it had nothing to do with the particular soap or aftershave but with the proximity. If I could smell a man, he was too close. Now Steve lit a cigarette and inhaled with a grimace, relishing the pain.

“How’s things in insurance?” he asked.

“Good enough,” I said.

“You’re an adjuster, right? Claims?”

I nodded.

Mr. Jansen returned with the coffee. He poured a cup from the thermos, and we passed it around, heading up the highway.

We turned onto a narrow rutted road, which ended in a blinding expanse of white. A dirty beige Pontiac was parked next to a rotted fence — dark leaning posts from which coils of rusted barbed wire ran like stitching through the quilted fields of snow. We got out of the truck.

“Hey, Tennessee,” Mr. Jansen said. The man in the car rolled down his window. A cigarette hung from his lip and toast crumbs flecked his beard. He had hard blue eyes and a red scar along the side of his nose. A little girl slept next to him, wrapped in a blanket.

“Boys,” he said, with a faint nod. He gazed through the windshield, his eyes fixed on something distant and still. “Cleared off a patch in the snow and put down corn.”

Steve reached for his wallet. It was fat with credit cards, and an accordion of brittle plastic held photos of his wife and two kids. He leaned through the window.

“C-note?” he said.

Tennessee nodded.

“That’s a costly turkey,” Steve said.

Tennessee swallowed. “You only get one, I guess it might be.” He continued to stare through the windshield. He didn’t seem unfriendly, just far away, preserving his distance, as if he weren’t really a party to this. Next to him, his little girl turned in her sleep, and he adjusted the blanket over her bare legs. Steve handed him the money. Tennessee put the folded bill in his shirt pocket without looking at it and slipped the car into gear, easing through the dry snow.

When he was gone, Steve said, “Hard-up fucking hillbilly.”

Mr. Jansen was unracking the guns and gathering our packs. We wore bulky camouflage snowsuits, each the same pattern — dark branches on a white background. We had only three guns, and so I carried the decoy, a brown plastic hen with galvanized-steel legs. Thinking of Tennessee, I wondered if we were trespassing. I guessed that baiting was illegal but kept quiet. Despite myself, I was looking forward to the hunt, and I hurried along in step with the others, through the deep drifted snow until, at the edge of the field, we came to the blind.

“Jesus,” Steve said, after we’d crowded in. He pulled out a monogrammed silver flask and poured us each a jigger of Scotch, as “an eye-opener,” he said. He winked at me, and said, “Sitting all day in a blind with a bunch of liberals.”

“I think you’ll survive,” Mr. Jansen told him.

“If we got stuck here, I’d eat you. I’d have no problem with that.”

The blind was a small dark hut with a flat tarpaper roof and a packed-dirt floor and two rectangular holes cut in the weathered boards. It sheltered us from the wind, and our huddled bodies seemed to warm it somewhat.