“Oh, no, I like construction noise. It’s very comforting somehow.”
“Unless it’s your neighbors.”
“Well, I hate those neighbors, so that’s different.”
“Right.”
“So maybe I’ll get working on that chicken.”
She must have betrayed something in the way she said that, because Richard gave her a little frown. “You OK?”
“No no no,” she said, “I love being up here. I love it. This is my favorite place in the world. It doesn’t
“I meant are you OK with my being here.”
“Oh, totally. God. Yes. Totally. Yah! I mean, you know how Walter loves you. I feel like we’ve been friends with you for so long, but I’ve hardly ever really talked to you. It’s a nice opportunity. But you truly shouldn’t feel you have to stay, if you want to get back to New York. I’m so used to being alone up here. It’s fine.”
This speech seemed to have taken her a very long time to get to the end of. It was followed by a brief silence between them.
“I’m just trying to hear what you’re actually saying,” Richard said. “Whether you actually want me here or not.”
“God,” she said, “I keep saying it, don’t I? Didn’t I just say it?”
She could see his patience with her, his patience with a female, reach its end. He rolled his eyes and picked up a section of two-by-four. “I’m going to wrap up here and then go for a swim.”
“It’s going to be cold.”
“Every day a little bit less so.”
Going back into the house, she experienced a cramp of envy of Walter, who was allowed to tell Richard that he loved him, and who wanted nothing destabilizing in return, nothing worse than to be loved himself. How easy men had it! She felt in comparison like a bloated sedentary spider, spinning her dry web year after year, waiting. She suddenly understood how the girls of years ago had felt, the girls of college who’d resented Walter’s free pass with Richard and been irritated by his pesky presence. She saw Walter, for a moment, as Eliza had seen him.
I might have to do it, I might have to do it, I might have to do it, she said to herself while washing the chicken and assuring herself that she didn’t actually mean it. She heard a splash from the lake and watched Richard swimming out in tree shadow toward water still gilded with afternoon light. If he really hated sunshine, the way he claimed to in his old song, northern Minnesota in June was a trying place to be. The days lasted so long that you found yourself surprised the sun wasn’t running low on fuel by the end of them. Just kept burning and burning. She yielded to an impulse to grab herself between the legs, to test the waters, for the shock of it, in lieu of going for a swim herself. Am I alive? Do I possess a body?
There were very odd angles in her cutting of the potatoes. They looked like some kind of geometric brainteaser.
Richard, after his shower, came into the kitchen in a textless T-shirt that must have been bright red some decades earlier. His hair was momentarily subdued, a youthful shiny black.
“You changed your look this winter,” he remarked to Patty.
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’? Your hair’s different, you look great.”
“Really hardly any different. Just a tiny bit different.”
“And—possibly put on a little weight?”
“No. Well. A little.”
“You look good with it. You look better not so skinny.”
“Is that a nice way of saying I’ve gotten fat?”
He shut his eyes and grimaced as if trying to remain patient. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Where is this bullshit coming from?”
“Ah?”
“Do you want me to leave? Is that it? There’s this weird phony thing you’re doing that gives me the impression you’re not comfortable with me here.”
The roasting chicken smelled like something of the sort she used to eat. She washed her hands and dried them, rummaged in the back of an unfinished cabinet, and found a bottle of cooking sherry covered with construction dust. She filled a juice glass with it and sat down at the table. “OK, frankly? I’m a little nervous around you.”
“Don’t be.”
“I can’t help it.”
“You have no reason to be.”
This was what she hadn’t wanted to hear. “I’m having this one glass,” she said.
“You’ve mistaken me for somebody who gives a shit how much you drink.”
She nodded. “OK. Good. That helps to know.”
“You’ve been wanting a drink this whole time? Jesus. Have a drink.”
“Doing just that.”
“You know, you’re a very strange person. I mean that as a compliment.”
“So taken.”
“Walter got very, very lucky.”
“Ho, well, that’s the unfortunate thing, isn’t it. I’m not sure he sees it that way anymore.”
“Oh, he does. Believe me, he does.”
She shook her head. “I was going to say that I don’t think he likes the things that are strange about me. He likes the good strange all right, but he’s none too happy about the bad strange, and the bad strange is mostly what he gets these days. I was going to say that it’s ironic that
“You wouldn’t want to be married to me.”
