a couple of Oxford American magazines while he uncorked a Côte du Rhône and poured it out in a pair of water tumblers. As they drank they sat there listening to the ticking of the old tall clock. She got up to study it.
“Did you grow up with this?” she asked.
“I did. It was a wedding gift to my parents. My father’s mother gave it to them. Hell of a gift to give somebody considering they didn’t have a house to put it in at the time. But there it was. Had to haul it around from three different places that weren’t much more than shacks before he finally got the money to build this place.”
“I like the sound it lends to a house,” she said. “Makes things seem more permanent. When I was growing up everything was just drywall and shag carpet. Seemed like we were being moved around like luggage through our own lives. I could see how it wore my mama down. I did. My dad didn’t, but I did. He never cared about a house. To him it was just a place you went when you were done working selling tires. I think that’s why I was in such a hurry to get out on my own. I love my parents, but by god I think I’d lose my mind if I ever became them.”
He came up behind her and held her shoulders. She eased beneath the weight of his hands. Together they listened to the steadfast sound of what had once been unwanted.
7
ORLYNNE WAS UNEASY ON THE MOONLIT PATH. TWICE SHE’D LOST the trail and had to guide herself back by the awkward angle of the cabin’s lights on the side of the mountain. It reared like a vessel on a black ocean and she aligned herself to it, made her path depend on direct opposition. By the time she reached the front steps her breath whistled high in her throat and her body felt like a heavy suit that did not properly fit. She waited until she had collected herself and tapped at the front door.
He fumbled from the back of the cabin, knocked over an object that thudded and clattered and he then came on and unbolted the door.
“Oh, Orlynne. I’d thought it was too late for you to come. Please,” Gerald said, stepping aside to usher her in.
She went back to the den where he had a television on. It made a sound like a stream of water in the room. He asked her if she would like something to drink.
“Tea if you have it,” she said.
“I do. Sit down.”
This was the first time out here among his things. A strange solace. How long had she known the old eccentric, even if by reputation alone? But she had never imagined what his home would be like, how he would arrange the finer details of his daily life. It was only when he had come to stay with Kyle that she’d seen him as a man, a lonely old man, who was no longer anything but another human within reach. How that made a difference in their talks. And quietly something had begun, something she felt giving way in the frozen passages of her own body. Still, this was theirs alone. This didn’t belong in the mouths of others. She knew how the talk would get around, how it would be reduced to an idle bit of humor, even among those she cared for and who cared for her in turn. There was an unintentional cruelty people committed against the old, laughing at what was a silent torment of the heart. So she had kept it from Kyle. Would keep this contentment to herself as long as she could. That was what you did with something you stole. And she knew that anything you had this late in life was a kind of theft.
He came back in and silenced the television, placed a cup and saucer with a Twinings tab hung over the rim. She lifted it and sipped.
“It’s very good,” she said.
“Good. I usually drink coffee. Are you hungry? I could find a snack.”
“No, I’m fine. I just came to see you. Like I said I would.”
He smiled, sat there with his hands heavily in his lap, without an idea of what else to say. It amused her to see him at such an awkward end with himself.
“I’ll have to admit, this is all pretty exciting,” she said.
“Exciting? How?”
“Coming out here in secret. Kyle doesn’t have any idea, I’m pretty sure.”
He laughed, the lines in his face beginning to relax.
“I’m sure Kyle would be scandalized. Some kind of rift in the Democratic Party would ensue, no doubt.”
She weighed this a moment before speaking.
“He cares about me. Wants me to be safe, but sometimes being safe can just be so goddamn boring, don’t you think?”
He said that he did and asked if she’d mind listening to some music. When she said that she’d love it he dropped the needle on a Leonard Cohen record and the mellow tones of “Suzanne” leaked from the speakers stuck at each end of the bookcase. She leaned her head against the back of the chair and shut her eyes. Cohen’s young voice was tranquilizing and she knew if she allowed it she could let it do something to memory, but she didn’t want that. She wanted to remember exactly when and where she was.
“Why don’t you come over here and hold my hand a little while,” she told him.
SHE WOKE in the middle of the night and immediately sensed his absence next to her in the bed. She sat up and saw him silhouetted against the bedroom window, a pistol clutched in his right hand. When she first tried to speak, her voice seized but she was able to make enough noise to turn his head.
“It’s okay. I’m just listening,” he told her.
“Listening?”
“I heard them out there for a while. They’ve been coming up to the back of the house the last few nights. Trying to either scare me or make me think I’m crazy, I guess.”
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and pulled her tennis shoes on. She had gone to bed with him fully dressed and they had lain there close together, made a signature of their companionship against their sleeping bodies, but with the feel of the floor beneath her feet, the good memory of that abruptly fled. It was all ache and strung nerve now. A sudden return to how the real world had the capacity to hurt.
“Have you seen anything?” she whispered.
He shook his head.
“They don’t want to be seen. Not yet, anyhow. They figure this is more effective. Trying to get inside my head.”
She strained to listen, tried to hear what he had, though the silence she gathered threw back dissolving echoes of itself. An ever-descending bottom that created greater depths the further she delved. She touched his arm.
“Come back to bed.”
He placed the pistol on the nightstand and pulled the covers up to his chest. She lay beside him, watched his eyes glisten in the dark.
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“No. I don’t think it, Gerald. I’ve never had a doubt.”
He tried to laugh but it didn’t quite come out that way.
“What the hell is happening to us, Orlynne? How did it get this bad?”
“Are you asking in the general or the
