‘That’s me. How did you know?’
He shrugged. ‘Whole town knows.’
Buck took another good look in his rearview mirror and then checked up ahead again to make sure the road was clear both ways. If he ever saw another car when he reached her driveway, he would just keep on up the road.
It was real handy, her living out here on the edge of town where there were no snoopy neighbors and he could park his car around the back where it couldn’t be seen from the road. It was certainly a whole lot better than doing it in some seedy motel on the interstate or up in the forest, bare-assed to the elements, or in the back of a truck in winter, which was all fine and dandy when you were young with the sap rising so fast it was a job keeping the lid on it. But as a man got older, love, like most things, required a little comfort.
Some time ago they had worked out a system. If she closed the curtains in the little window nearest the road, it meant she had company and he should drive on by. He was glad to see that tonight they were open. He could see a light on inside and imagined her in there, showered and smelling all fresh and ready for him. The thought made his pants tighten a little at the crotch.
Buck never had trouble finding an excuse to be away from home. There was always a meeting to attend or neighbor to visit or a deal to do in town. On those rare occasions when things got tricky, there were always friends he could count on for cover. Tonight he was supposed to be - and indeed had been, for awhile anyhow - at a stockgrowers’ meeting in Helena. Mostly, he didn’t even have to lie because Eleanor never asked where he was going or how late he would be and she was always in bed asleep when he got home.
The road was clear and he swung the car into the driveway and parked behind the old station wagon. The door to the house opened as he was getting out and he saw her in her black bathrobe lean her shoulder against the door frame, smiling that knowing smile of hers and waiting for him. She watched him walk toward her, neither one of them saying a word, and when he reached her, he slipped his hands inside her robe and held her by her naked hips while he kissed her neck.
‘Ruth Michaels,’ he said. ‘You’re the sexiest goddamn woman this side of the Missouri River.’
‘Oh yeah? So who is it you’re seeing on the other side?’
Later, at home, as he shed his clothes for the second time that night, Buck’s mind ran with matters much less steamy. From the narrow closet area that linked bedroom and bathroom, he watched Eleanor’s sleeping shape in their big brass bed and wondered what in God’s name she thought she was playing at, offering Ruth the money.
Ruth seemed to find it amusing. She’d broken the news about half an hour after he arrived, when they were lying sticky and sated and he was thinking, for no particular reason, about that pretty young biologist all alone up there in the forest and wondering what his chances might be in that direction. And as if to punish him for his thoughts, Ruth had said, almost matter-of-fact, that Eleanor was going to bail her out and become her business partner. He’d almost fallen off the bed.
‘Your business partner!’
Ruth laughed. ‘You know, when she came in I was so nervous, I thought uh-oh, here it comes, she knows. But then she sits there with her cappuccino and offers me the money.’
‘She can’t do that. For Christsake, Ruthie, I’ve told you, I’ll give you the damn money.’
‘I couldn’t take your money.’
‘But hers is okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I don’t get it.’
‘Well, Buck honey, you think about it.’
Then she’d laughed, which made her breasts move in a way that was disconcerting when a man was trying to assess important news. He’d asked her what was so funny and Ruth told him Eleanor had said she’d want to be more than just a ‘sleeping partner’.
Buck didn’t think that was funny at all.
He stood in the shower and sluiced the smell of sex from his body while he considered things. He couldn’t say a word, of course, until Eleanor chose to tell him. And hell, after all, it was her money. Her daddy had left it to her and she could flush it down whichever toilet she pleased. But if it happened, it was bound to make life more complicated. One of the basic rules of adultery was that wife and mistress be kept as far apart as possible. Ruth, to his amazement, didn’t seem to think it was a problem.
He dried himself in front of the mirror, routinely admiring his body and checking it for any mark she might have made on him. He was all clear. Then he cleaned his teeth, flashed himself a humorless smile and walked back through to the bedroom, avoiding the floorboards that creaked. He switched off his bedside light which Eleanor always left on for him and slipped quietly into bed beside her.
As always, she was turned away, facing the wall, and didn’t so much as stir. He couldn’t even hear her breathing. Sometimes he thought she only pretended to be asleep.
‘Goodnight,’ he said quietly. But there was no answer.
Women, Buck thought, as the ceiling dimly configured itself in the darkness above him. Even after all these years, with all the work he’d put in trying to know as many and as much about them as possible, they remained, in the end, one of God’s great unraveled mysteries.
Eleanor listened to him sighing and shifting and knew he was lying on his side, facing her, perhaps even watching her for any sign that she was awake. She lay still. Soon he would sigh again and turn the other way and then, in about five minutes, would settle on his back and his throat would click and he would start to snore.
She envied him the ease with which he could slip away from the world. Long ago, in the days when she still believed sleep was at least a possibility, she had tried the ritual herself: left side, right side, back. But it never worked.
His snoring wasn’t loud, except when he had been drinking. It was more of a rushing sound, like the bellows he used on the living-room fire in winter. The rhythm of her own breathing was faster than his and every night she fought to maintain it. But she always gave in. She would lie there, holding the spent air uncomfortably in her lungs, resenting with every accelerated beat of her heart that even in sleep her husband’s will should so prevail.
Sometimes, when she was sure he was asleep, she would turn quietly and lightly, so as not to move the mattress, and lie studying him. She would watch the rise and fall of his great chest, the quiver of his open lips as he exhaled. Slackened by sleep, his upturned face was oddly childlike, almost touching. There was a pale band across his forehead, like a halo, where his hat shielded him from the sun. Eleanor would search her heart for some vestige of love and try to remember how it was to feel more for him than pity or contempt.
She had known about Buck’s record with women before they married, though not its full extent. A friend of a friend had firsthand experience and conveyed a warning that was easy to misconstrue as sour grapes. When Eleanor confronted him, he disarmed her with what passed for a full confession then proceeded to convince her that his wilder oats had only been sown in a lonely quest that had led at last to her.
Even had she not believed him, she would probably still have married him. His appetite for women was a weakness and, in one so visibly strong, weakness of any sort could be appealing. It stirred in Eleanor’s Catholic blood some deep, redemptive urge. She was not the first woman, nor would she likely be the last, to marry a man in the belief that she might save him.
The fact that Buck Calder was either unready for salvation or perhaps incapable of it took only a few short years to emerge, though it took several more for Eleanor to acknowledge.
His work as a state legislator and champion of the livestock industry gave him ample opportunity to play away from home and what her eyes couldn’t see, her heart could safely eschew. He was a skilled and thoughtful deceiver, selecting his women with care to avoid those who might later come screaming vengeance in the night. Those he lay with always seemed to know the rules. They never called him at home or smeared make-up on his clothes or seemed to mark him, even in
their wildest throes, with their teeth or nails.
Denial is a creature of infinite resource, wriggling its way into the finest crevices of the mind to spin its cocoons around fear and suspicion. And Eleanor, being spared much of the routine ignominy of the cheated wife, was a willing host.
Even when, by chance at the hairdresser’s, she saw a photograph in a local magazine of Buck at a cattlemen’s dinner, entwined with a young rodeo queen, she readily gave him the benefit of the doubt. He was a man whom women found attractive, for heaven’s sake. It wasn’t his fault. And he was hers and the father of her children. And he loved her, she knew he loved her, for he told her so and showed her.
It was Kathy’s birth that changed things.
Eleanor’s waters broke a fortnight early, when Buck was at a livestock conference in Houston. Everything happened in such a rush it wasn’t until late that night, with the baby safely swaddled in her arms, that she called his hotel from her hospital bed and was put through to his room. A woman answered the phone, one to whom he obviously hadn’t yet had time to explain the rules.
‘Mr Calder’s bed,’ she purred, before the phone was snatched from her.
Buck came home and came clean. And for the sake of the children, but also because he was as good at contrition as he was at cheating, Eleanor was prepared to forgive him for what he promised was his only transgression. Nothing could excuse what he’d done, he said. But there he’d been, away in a strange city, all on his own, and after a few drinks too many, a man could sometimes go astray. And with Eleanor being pregnant and all and it being awhile since they’d last well, you know.
She put him through six months of purgatory, banished him from her bed and tried not to feel sorry for him while he played the penitent husband, taking his proper punishment like a man. He tended to the children as well as all the work on the ranch, while she looked after the baby.
Careful to remain aloof and stony, Eleanor was secretly impressed by how much he knew about the many tedious details of what had always been her domain. He coped; he more than coped. He got Henry and Lane up in the morning and got them fed and bathed and to bed at night. He got the groceries in without having to ask her what they needed. He bought her flowers and cooked special suppers for her, which she ate without comment. He was courteous and considerate, giving her a chastened little smile if ever she should deign to look his way.
Eleanor didn’t know how many Hail Marys adultery deserved, but she was just starting to think he might have done enough when two commiserating friends made the mistake of thinking she should now hear what they had always kept from her. Over coffee one morning, they gave her chapter and verse about others Buck had bedded in the past few years, including some Eleanor had counted as friends.
She should, she now knew, have followed their advice and left him. But in some diminished corner of her heart, she felt that Buck might yet be saved. Sometimes she would look out from the kitchen window at the snowbound pasture and see the cottonwood growing from the rusting Model T and she would tell herself that anything was possible, that the good Lord brooked no wreckage that did not contain at least a seed of hope.
Eventually she allowed him back into her bed, though it would be another three years before she allowed him to make love to her again. Not that she didn’t want him. There were times when she woke hot and wet in the night and felt the need of him so badly that it took all her strength not to reach out for him and wake him and take him into her in lustful absolution.
It was in precisely this way that Luke was conceived. And during the months that followed, as their last child grew in her womb, Eleanor and Buck found a passion in their coupling that seemed to surprise and excite him as much as her. He was the only man who had ever made love to her, but not until then had her flesh fully woken to him.
Thinking back on that time, even now, so many years later, Eleanor could almost feel the bruise and ache of their love-making and be ashamed that she should have let herself be so carnally consumed. If only she had been decent and restrained herself, perhaps the pain of his subsequent betrayals would have been more bearable. It would have been better never to have known him in this way. For, with the arrival of Luke - her son, as unlike a father as a boy could be - their passion ended.
For Buck, she later thought, it probably seemed merely like the end of another affair.
She took his criticism of Luke as criticism of herself, for the boy was indeed the image of her and his frailty and failings must thus be hers.
Their other children had learned early to sleep through the night. Only if they were sick did they ever sleep in their parents’ bed. But Luke cried and cried and cried and the only way to make him stop was to bring him to her bed and hold him till he fell asleep.
At first Buck would make her carry him back to his crib, but Luke would always jerk awake and cry again and soon, despite Buck’s protests, she let the child stay all night.
Thus was the new geometry of their life conformed: Eleanor, tired and defensive; her husband ousted and angry and soon back to his wanderings (which, from this point on, she would do her best to ignore and try - try so very hard - to pity him for); and this new boy child, who had so literally come between them.
And so the long winter of their marriage began. Devoid already of desire and soon of friendship too, there wasn’t even warmth enough for mutual comfort when young Henry died. The closest they came to connecting in their grief was the row they’d had on the day after the funeral. Buck had found her ironing her dead son’s laundry and called her a fool. What did he expect, she asked, that she should throw the boy’s clothes away?
She heard her husband turn now and adjust his pillow.
Soon he was snoring and she lay listening to him, wondering whose bed he had been in earlier. And doing her best, after all these years, not to care.
Dan escorted Helen to her pickup outside The Last Resort where they’d gone for a beer after leaving the diner. She thanked him for a great evening and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
‘Angels on your body,’ she said as she drove away.
‘And on yours.’
It was getting on for midnight and the town was deserted. She headed out to where the pavement ended and turned onto the gravel road that led up the valley. Buzz, who had been sleeping in the pickup, rode shotgun in the front seat.
It was the first time she had driven the route in the dark, and after leaving the main road near the top of the valley it became a little complicated. There were no signs and she knew she had to take two right turns and one left but she got one wrong and ended up at a ranch where dogs came barking and someone peered out, silhouetted in yellow light, from an upstairs window. She waved and turned the pickup around then stopped a little way back down the road so that she could study the map with a flashlight.
At last, at the forest’s edge, she found the row of five mailboxes, her own among them, that marked a turning, all but hidden by trees. Here the gravel road turned to dirt and wound through the forest for another four steep and rutted miles to Eagle Lake. The mailboxes were all different colors. Hers was white. The others belonged, she supposed, to cabins or houses she had yet to discover. The only other signs of human life she’d so far seen up here were a solitary hiker and a huge logging truck that had nearly run her off the road that afternoon.
As the old pickup lurched and creaked its way through the trees, she thought about what Dan had tried to say at dinner. God, a woman could do a whole lot worse than Dan Prior. She’d proved it herself several times over. She was touched and even, for a moment, flattered that he should still feel that way about her - until her other self, the one that always sliced her off at the knees when she started to feel remotely good about herself, clicked in and told her not to be stupid; the poor guy was divorced, lonely and probably just plain desperate.
Eagle Lake lay in a clearing, a shallow bowl of meadow half a mile long that in early summer erupted in a blaze of mountain flowers. The cabin stood on the bowl’
s western rim some thirty yards from the water at the top of a gentle slope that was divided by a stream where mule deer came at dawn and dusk to drink.
Helen’s headlights found them there now, eight or nine of them, as the pickup came up and out of the trees. They looked up as one, quite unafraid, and Helen stopped and for a few moments they watched each other, while Buzz, alert and watching too, quivered and made little whining noises. Then the deer turned and slowly moved away until the white of their tails merged into the trees and disappeared.
She parked the pickup beside the cabin and while Buzz went off to forage, she leaned her back against the hood and looked up at the sky. There was no moon and every far-flung star in the firmament was pitching for the job. She had never seen a sky so incandescent. The air was still and smelled of pine.
Helen filled her lungs and coughed. She was definitely going to quit smoking. Forever. She would just have one last cigarette and that would be it. Absolutely definitely.
She lit up and walked down beside the stream, surprised that starlight alone could make a shadow of her. On a spit of gravel at the lake’s edge there was a wooden boat once presumably used for fishing but now rotten and colonized by reeds. She tested its bows as a seat and found them solid and she sat there to smoke her final cigarette and ponder the sky’s reflection in the glass of the water.
Now and then, above her in the trees, she could hear Buzz exploring and once she thought she heard the footfall of some larger animal. But all else was silent, not the croak of a frog nor the flicker of an insect’s wing, as if the world this night were in suspended deference to the sky. Gazing at the water, she saw the mirrored fall of a meteor and fancied that from that distant shore of the universe she also heard its roar.
She hadn’t seen a shooting star since her last night on the Cape and she closed her eyes now and wished the same convoluted cheat of a wish that she had wished then, three rolled into one, that Joel was safe and would come back as he had promised and that he would want (which she doubted most of all) to be with her.