The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (13 page)

The water was warm and inclined to be somewhat weedy except over the cold springs that fed the pond, where it was suddenly cool and deep and clear. There was a rough plank boat dock that dipped and swayed at the edge of the water, and we would sit on it, pulling our shivering knees together, Danny with his arms around me. We would drink vodka from a bottle that we kept bobbing on the surface of the water next to us. We shivered, I think, more from the beauty of the night than
from the temperature of it—we were never really cold enough to need the blanket we brought with us.

Maybe it was the beauty or maybe it was the vodka that went to Danny's head. Whatever the case, it wasn't too long after we'd finished canning the tomatoes that he pulled me close to him one night alone at the dock and, whispering into my mouth, asked me if I loved him. In such a situation, there is no answer other than yes.

Even at nighttime, it is possible to fly right up to the very edge of the sun.

6

AUTUMN

IT USED TO BE THAT IF YOU
drove south from town, heading toward Millboro, first you passed Honeysuckle Road and then, a mile or so later, Dandelion Road and then nothing for a long time until you crossed Wildwood Drive. That was the last paved crossroad. After that, you started counting mailboxes. The mailboxes stood in rickety little congregations huddled together by the side of the asphalt so that people who lived scattered out in the woods had to come up to the road to get their mail. At the seventh cluster of mailboxes after Wildwood Drive, there was a gap in the trees and a dirt trail, just wide enough for a narrow car, that led off down to the right. The trail split at a big tree stump. The left-hand fork wound through more woods and then a meadow where we used to see foxes and then ended at a three-room cabin with a brook behind it and woods of pine and dogwood all around it. There was a fireplace and a tiny wooden deck perched above the brook where we thought we would make love all the time. Danny and I went to live there
together when my lease was up at the end of September.

If you are in love, pokey little cabins in the woods seem magic and beautiful and you don't notice things like the way the whole place smells like mold or how the lights work only intermittently or how spiders are always in the bathtub. Or, if you do notice those things, it is only because they seem funny and endearing, and you make jokes about them together and eat dinner by candlelight together and fight off the spiders together. If you are in love, any dump seems like heaven, and really it is. When we die and finally reach the afterlife, I don't guess we will care at all about the furnishings—we will care only that the people we love are there.

Our friends all came by the first evening after we moved in and brought housewarming gifts and drank wine and tequila and beer with us. Tom and Rosalita brought us a copy of Fried-rich Engels's
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
that still had the cover on. Vera brought us a case of Dutch beer in bottles. Billy Joe made us a bedside table, and Rafi painted it to look like a cow. Pancho made us a cassette tape of Beethoven piano sonatas, and Blossom brought a sweet potato pie, a cherry pie, a black-bottom rum pie, and a whole salt-cured ham. Jake brought us
The Collected Poems of W. H. Auden,
but he never actually gave it to us—just left it on the kitchen table and then went home.

Everybody else stayed all night, and we ran around in the woods and howled at the moon. Just at dawn, Pancho and Pamela decided to sing hymns about the Jordan River down by the tiny stream, and their voices echoed together among the trees like skylarks. Danny said he thought he saw them kiss, but nothing came of it then, and Danny eventually admitted he wasn't really sure after all.

Before I moved, Orla had come over and sat on the third-hand couch in my living room, watching me as I packed boxes.

“You certainly weren't here very long,” she said.

“Well, I only had a six-month lease.”

“You could have renewed it, I'm sure.”

“Um, well, a friend of mine found a place out toward Millboro that we're going to share. It'll be a lot cheaper.”

“A friend?”

Orla had spied Danny coming home with me at dawn or kissing me goodbye in the doorway in the afternoon or sacked out all day under the shade trees out back, but she had never spoken to him.

“A friend,” I said, wrapping newspaper around some mismatched dishes. “My boyfriend.”

Orla pursed her lips. “A boyfriend,” she said skeptically. “Someone you've known quite awhile, I guess?”

“Awhile,” I said evasively.

“Girls these days move so
fast
,” she said.

“Well, there's a war on, you know.”

Orla just looked blankly at me.

“Girls these days don't set much store by marriage anymore, I guess,” she sighed after a minute, and shook her head in a pitying way.

“We'll get married,” I said too quickly.

Orla shook her head again. “Girls always think so, I'm sure,” she said.

There was wild honking outside as Danny and Billy Joe pulled up in Billy Joe's truck to get the furniture.

“They're here,” I said to Orla. “We're going to need that couch now.”

“Girls always think so,” she said again, getting up.

She left by the back door without meeting Danny.

Jake and I were alone in the bar. He was drinking his first Natty BoHo, and I was leaning on the cash register, watching
Jeopardy!
with the sound off. I was telling him about my conversation with Orla.

“Do you want to be married?” he asked me.

“To Danny?” I said.

“No—just to anyone. Do you want that?”

“Well, we're supposed to want it, right? Aren't we all supposed to want to find true love—forever?”

“Do you know anyone who is married and who is happy?”

I thought about it for a minute.

“No,” I said. “But then again, I don't know anyone who is unmarried who is happy either.”

“Aren't you happy?”

“I'm happy with Danny.”

“It's not the same thing, is it?”

“Besides, he hasn't asked me to marry him. That was just something I said to my neighbor to get her to shut up. He's never brought up marriage at all.”

“He will.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he always does—he can't help himself. Danny is a romantic.”

“Liar,” I said. “Who has he asked to marry him?”

“You can't believe he doesn't have a past—that you're the only one he's ever loved.”

“Of course not,” I said, a sinking feeling in my stomach. “But I'm the one he loves now.” I remembered again how I had never liked Jake. “What do you care about it anyway?”

“I don't care, actually,” Jake said. “Just making conversation.”

He turned back to his beer, and I turned the volume up on the television. I wished he would go away, but he just stayed there watching the end of
Jeopardy!
and then reruns of
Gilligan's Island
and
The Addams Family.
He was still there, very drunk but quiet, when Rafi came in to relieve me at eight. I went straight home, but Danny was out, so I ate a sandwich from the last of Blossom's ham and went to bed.

When I told Jake that I wasn't thinking about marriage, I was lying. Because once I had said the word to Orla, it became stuck in my head, stubborn and sulking, like a brooding unsociable guest who hates the party but nevertheless doesn't leave. Marriage to Danny—the idea of it colored the afternoon silence after we made love, lurked in the corners of our little cabin in the woods, watched us at the grocery store while we bought bread and eggs and in the bar where other boys never flirted with me anymore and where the seat next to him was always for me. I never said the word out loud to Danny, but he heard it anyway.

He went without me every week to visit his parents where they lived out in the country on the other side of Millboro. While he was gone, I washed dishes or cleaned the bathtub or watched TV or went down to the Cave and got drunk.

“Do your parents know I exist?” I asked him.

“Exist in what way?” he said.

“What do you mean ‘in what way'? How many ways are there?”

“Do you mean do they know I have a girlfriend, or do you mean they know it's you and who you are and all about you, or what?”

“Do they know you live here with me?”

“They know I'm sharing a house with you. They haven't inquired into the sleeping arrangements too closely.”

“Do they know my name?”

“Believe me, sugar, you don't want to do this.”

“Do what?”

“You don't want to get mixed up with all that—with my family. You don't want them coming in here and making themselves part of our life. We're happy now just like this, aren't we? Let's leave it be.”

So I didn't say any more, didn't mention it that night or all the next day. But I didn't stop thinking about it.

Finally, late the second day, Danny broke.

“Okay, okay, okay!” he said out of the blue. “I give up! I'll take you to meet them.”

“I'm sure it will be nice,” I said.

“Just don't say I didn't warn you.”