Mallory and Philip stood on the shoulder of the highway, arguing. She was sure that, if they just unloaded the trunk and actually looked for it, they would find the jack.
“There isn’t one,” Philip said. “I know my own car.”
Mallory surveyed the highwayside landscape: the white, pristine snow by the treeline and the gray, pebble-riven stuff compacted beneath the frosty metal guardrail.
“What does it hurt to find out?” she said.
Mallory knew he was just being defensive because he had blown the tire out. He’d been looking at the directions and hadn’t noticed a chunk of rock, dislodged at some point from the granite embankment just outside the guardrail, that had tumbled onto the road. Now his car sat ticking down on the shoulder, its back right tire in tatters. Philip drove a brown Volvo sedan, with a gouge down the driver’s side from a too-ambitious turn in a parking garage. They were about an hour west of Concord, New Hampshire, somewhere on Route 89. It was the fifth of January, 1984. They had been dating for a little more than two years.
“I’m going to flag someone down, and they’ll take me to the nearest gas station, and I’ll call Triple-A,” Philip said. He wore a bright purple ski jacket and blue jeans, a black knit hat, and a pair of black leather gloves. He was tall, thin, with a short brown beard and a dour, handsome face. Recently she had started to wonder what he would look like without his beard. A friend had said that it was like he had a whole other face, one he was unwilling to show her. The friend had been joking, but now Mallory could not stop thinking about it.
Mallory opened the trunk. Duffel bags, a cardboard box full of wine and liquor. A canvas tote, which held her hardback sketchbook and the coin purse full of segments of vine charcoal. Three paper grocery bags containing proofs of a high school algebra textbook—his work. Why are these in here? she wanted to ask. Why hadn’t he left them in his office? Besides this there was a tennis bag with a few cheap rackets, three aluminum tennis ball tubes (two full, one empty), a coil of fraying blue rope, and a stack of nested plastic pots still caked in rich, black potting soil speckled with white granules of fertilizer, or plant food, or whatever those brittle pebbles were. Philip grew tomatoes and chives on the fire escape outside his living room window. Now he stood on the edge of the highway, rocking from his toes to his heels, as though it was just a matter of time before someone came along to save them.
Mallory took everything out of the trunk and put it on the gray, salt-stained shoulder. Out came the wine and liquor, the duffel bags, the rope. The textbook manuscripts she took, one by one, and stacked in the back seat, so there was no way Philip could accuse her of being careless. Once everything was clear she could access the spare tire, which sat on the left side of the trunk beneath a dirty black carpeted cover. She got the cover off fine, but the tire was wedged in too tightly for her to move.
“Here’s someone,” Philip said. Mallory saw a green car come over the ridge they had just passed. She pulled on the tire with all her weight, feeling a slight twinge in the middle of her back. The tire jostled loose, and she pulled it into the well in the center of the trunk, revealing an expandable jack and a black tire iron covered in rust. She whooped. Philip came over and looked in, his hands on his hips. The green car he’d flagged down pulled onto the shoulder behind them, but Mallory waved them off. The driver, a man about Philip’s age, seemed to hesitate, but then steered back onto the road. A child in the back seat pressed his mouth against the window and inflated his cheeks, so that his mouth looked like a wound. Mallory waved at him cheerfully. The child drew back and frowned.
Philip got down on all fours and wedged the jack under the car and then began cranking it. He ought to loosen the lug nuts on the wheel while it was still on the ground, when it was easier to get a purchase on them, but she did not say anything. It would have offended him. Philip was a man, after all, and like all men suffered from debilitating bouts of certainty. Mallory stood back, letting him grunt and clang away.
They were on their way to visit Philip’s friend Joel and his wife Pansy at Pansy’s family’s vacation home. Mallory could not believe anyone younger than seventy could be named Pansy, but she kept that to herself. Mallory was trying to be less critical, less judgmental. Recently she had been taking her lunch breaks in the Harvard Art Museum, which was close to the architecture firm where she worked. She went to see a series of John Singer Sargent drawings: sketches of hands, gesture drawings, his preparatory studies for the frieze of the saints that now hung in the Boston Public Library. She liked the studies more than the finished works because the studies still contained something unsettled and equivocal; they belonged to the realm of living, fallible thought.
She was trying to apply this openness to her own life, but it was tough sledding. None of Mallory’s relationships before Philip had made it past the two-year mark. Twenty-four months seemed to reveal everything there was to know about a person, corroding the exterior and laying bare the simpering, needy thing within. Whether they left her or she left them, most of the men Mallory had dated said a variation of the same thing: that she was too quick to find fault, too eager to see the ways things might go wrong. She did not want that to happen with Philip, and so she was trying not to focus too intensely on the things she disliked about him, for instance how he would often fail to notice bits of food left in his mustache, how so many of his shirts were stained at the breast pocket from uncapped pens, as though he were lactating ink. How he hated to be told he had forgotten something—a phone number, a conversation, the title of a book. How she’d heard him whisper her name in a fierce, frustrated hiss while he was washing the dishes or sweeping the hallway. How he would rather hitch a ride to an unknown gas station rather than admit he might be wrong about what was in his own trunk.
Instead, she chose to focus on his better qualities. He was witty, charming, could quote Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, could throw a baseball beautifully, his body uncorking in a pleasing and intensely masculine way she could not quite explain. He had a wonderful singing voice, enjoyed cooking, made love generously and ambitiously. His mind was a storehouse of useless, sparkling facts, which he collected not because he wanted to impress anyone but because he seemed to find the world genuinely astonishing. He was easily, delightedly, gobsmacked. He loved her, had said so.
So why, watching him crank the last lug nuts tight on the gleaming black spare tire, did she still feel something was missing?
Philip had written the directions to Pansy’s house on a sheet of yellow legal paper, which he had folded into thirds and tucked between his steering wheel and the dash. He routinely unfolded these directions and checked them, then refolded and replaced the paper, even after this maneuver had directly led to his blowing out the tire. Mallory decided not to comment on this and instead thumbed through Philip’s cassette collection, which he kept in a wooden case beneath the passenger seat. Someone might break into the car to take the tape deck, which Philip always locked in the trunk when they parked, but why anyone would want to steal his collection of Steely Dan tapes was beyond Mallory. The music was lavish and dull, and the tapes themselves were dirty. She always had to brush crumbs and hair off the cases when she pulled them from this wooden crate.
Philip was an editor for a textbook company. He worked on middle and high school math and science books, with some college texts here and there. He had neither the head for business nor the stomach for teaching, and so he had wound up in the strange country between them. Most of his job seemed to be arguing with a copy editor he referred to only as Fucking Liza.
Philip unfolded the directions and looked at them again.
He leaned forward over the dash and squinted.
“Exit two five three,” he said to himself.
He talked to himself, that was another thing.
They pulled off the highway and drove through a little town—not much more than a church, gas station, and post office. Philip stopped at the gas station to fill up and ask if they could have a regular tire put on. Mallory sat in the car and canted her head against the window. She looked out at the large pile of snow that had been pushed into one corner of the parking lot. A few adolescent boys had climbed on top of it and were now throwing large chunks of hard, icy snow onto the pavement and cheering as each one shattered.
Philip got back in the car and sighed, then explained that he’d have to come back tomorrow to get the tire changed. He handed Mallory a pack of cigarettes.
“What’s this?” Mallory said.
“Peace offering,” Philip said. “I’m sorry about all that with the flat.”
“It’s fine,” Mallory said, though what she longed for was a proper fight. Sometimes, she wanted him to scream at her, she wanted to feel his spit land on her face. She wouldn’t enjoy it, but at least she would know it was possible. Philip got angry at his older brothers, at the slow-draining kitchen sink, at Fucking Liza—but never at her. This troubled Mallory. It seemed to suggest a lack of investment, of care.
They left the gas station. Mallory turned the heater all the way up, then opened her window just a crack and smoked with the cigarette dangling through this narrow gap. She barely got any smoke out of it, but she liked to feel the wind flicking against the cigarette as Philip drove.
Pansy’s was one of a hundred or so large, drab brown houses built around a golf course. Board-and-batten and classic New England shingle, high pitched roofs, large decks mounded in snow. The roads, named Fairway and Five Iron and Dogleg, had been plowed and scattered with coarse yellow sand that crunched under their tires.
They arrived to find Joel pulling firewood out from a pile that sat beneath a snow-covered blue tarp.
“Great news,” he said when Philip and Mallory parked. “The furnace is out.”
Joel was tall and broad-shouldered, with a square jaw and a nose slightly askew, a high school football injury. He and Philip had gone to college together in upstate New York.
His wife, Pansy, came carefully down the snow-caked front steps. She was a tall, slender woman, her figure evident even beneath her puffy winter coat. Her cheeks were high and flushed from the labor, but her voice was still low, smooth, and bored.
“The place is a fucking icebox,” Joel said happily, clapping two pieces of firewood together.
“Fiddle’s coming for it,” Pansy said.
Mallory had met Joel and Pansy once before, at a Halloween party. Philip had dressed in an old white crewneck sweatshirt festooned with fuzzy balls of many colors; he was a virus. Mallory’s Amelia Earhart wore a brown leather jacket and a pair of thrifted motorcycle goggles. Joel and Pansy had each gone as tomatoes, with matching red sweaters and green bonnets on their heads. Joel had shaken Mallory’s hand, then put a heavy arm around her shoulders and drawn her close.
“Listen,” he’d said conspiratorially. “I’m looking to charter a flight for our anniversary.”
“I recommend traveler’s insurance,” Mallory said.
Joel hooted with laughter. Pansy merely smiled—still glamorous, somehow, even as a tomato.
“She’s good,” Joel had said to Philip. “I like her.”
That was just a few months ago. Now here they all were, ready to freeze together for the weekend.
Mallory grabbed their bags from the trunk and went into the house, which was warmer than the outdoors, though just barely. In the entryway there was a large coat rack and a bench with several pairs of snow boots underneath it. Beside this, a small, dark table with a telephone on it and a corkboard above that covered in notes, telephone numbers, and coupons. A staircase to the left, the kitchen to the right. Mallory breathed a few times and watched her breath billow out from her mouth. Then she went to the kitchen tap. The water ran. In her second year of college, she had lived in a slouching farmhouse just off campus. She had stayed there over winter break, the only one to do so, and then had decided to take a spur-of-the-moment trip down to New York. When she returned, she found the pipes had frozen and burst throughout most of the house. She was from California and knew fire, poison oak, traffic. She hadn’t known until then that freezing water could rip through metal like paper.
She went into the large living room, where Joel and Pansy had started a fire in the stone fireplace. More wood was drying out in front of it, atop a quilt of old newspapers. It was warmer in this room, but still not quite comfortable. The house was too open and airy for a fireplace to properly heat it. It had been built in the landscape, not for it. Above her, dark wooden beams—decorative, most likely—spanned the room between expanses of white popcorn ceiling. High-pile wall-to-wall carpet the color of milky coffee, a big sectional couch, a coffee table stacked high with issues of years-old National Geographic and children’s books. On the wooden mantle above the crackling flames there was a large wooden loon with two red glass beads for eyes.
Pansy, Joel, and Philip came in, bearing more logs from the pile outside. Pansy returned to the table near the door and picked up the phone. She dialed a number and tucked the receiver between her head and shoulder. Mallory admired the slimness of her hips, her wealthy thinness. Mallory had wide hips and large feet; growing up, her brothers had called her Ground-Bound and The Dodo. She did not speak with them much anymore.
“Pansy’s been trying Fiddle all day,” Joel said. “We’ll have to spend the night in the living room, I think. And I can see the way you’re looking at her, Mal, but she’s taken.”
“You keep saying ‘fiddle,’” Mallory said. Pansy slammed the phone down and sighed.
“He’s our man,” Pansy said. She went to the fireplace and began prodding at the base of the blaze with a long cast-iron poker. “Handyman, caretaker, groundskeeper. He’s usually on top of everything. Then again, he was also supposed to stack the wood under the porch.”
Fiddle, Pansy. Everyone in this place had a name like an old, well-loved horse.
“Should we start drinking?” Joel said. “I feel like we should start drinking.”
Joel and Philip sat in front of the fire, drinking scotch and talking about their old friends. Night had fallen. The house was a bit warmer now, warm enough at least for Mallory and Pansy to work in the kitchen in just sweaters and knit hats. If the house were simply smaller, Mallory thought, this wouldn’t be a problem. A tin thermometer nailed up just outside the kitchen window said the temperature was twelve degrees. They were making sausage and white bean soup. Mallory was on garlic duty.
“I’m so embarrassed,” Pansy said. “This is barbaric.”
“Oh, this is nothing,” Mallory said. She then told the story of the frozen pipes, how she’d come back from New York City and found the old lathe-and-plaster walls bowed out and weeping water the color of olive brine, which had a distinct and penetrating smell that lingered long after it had been mopped up and the walls replaced.
“It was like a wet dog’s farts,” Mallory said. She smiled. She had grown up warm and comfortable in northern California and thought of her time in that old, waterlogged house as adventurous, daring. Pansy seemed mildly aghast. She began to pay very close attention to the onion she was dicing.
“How long have you and Joel been married?” Mallory said.
“Three years,” Pansy said. “Philip sang at our wedding. I guess that was just before you. He was dating this other woman at the time, Nell.”
“I’ve heard of Nell.”
“I liked her,” Pansy said. “Bit tony for Phil, though.”
Pansy dumped her onions into the pot, where they landed with a sizzle. She inspected Mallory’s cutting board.
“That’s plenty of garlic,” she said.
The four of them ate on the floor in front of the fireplace, where they planned to spend the night. Pansy and Joel would sleep on a set of sleeping pads they’d brought in from the garage, while Mallory and Philip would each take an axis of the sectional. Joel had brought down extra blankets and pillows from the bedrooms on the second floor. After dinner, Mallory stepped out to have a cigarette, but it was too cold to smoke more than half of it, and she extinguished it in the conical snow pile that had formed on top of a railing post.
Later they sat in a circle and played euchre, and the drinking began in earnest, mostly Four Roses and hot water in mugs they kept warm on the foot of the fireplace. Joel drank and drank but did not seem to get any drunker. He was a canny, boisterous player, the best of all of them by far, and so he was eventually paired with Mallory, whose experience with trick-taking games extended to hearts and no further. Philip and Pansy were more demure players, complimenting each other on clever plays and never taking anything too seriously.
“Christ,” Joel said after they’d lost another hand. “I’ve never lost to Pansy before.”
“That’s only because we usually play together,” Pansy said. She gathered the cards up and shuffled. “So, you’re an architect?”
“Draftsman, actually,” Mallory said. Her face was hot, and she could not look at Joel. She found that she was more competitive in games she did not know how to play; she felt that things should come easy to her and was astonished when they did not.
“She’s certified,” Philip said. “She’s passed the test. She should be an architect.”
“You have to have a certain set of qualifications at my firm.”
“Such as?” Pansy said. She dealt the cards in twos and threes, one of euchre’s hard-to-fathom customs.
“A penis and at least one testicle,” Mallory said. She studied her cards. “Two if you’ve got them handy.”
Pansy laughed—she was drunk, Mallory thought—but Joel’s face darkened. He and Mallory lost one trick, then another.
“Christ,” Joel muttered. He looked up, finally, at Mallory. “Tell me, partner, do you think a woman’s got the same brain as a man? Hormonally.”
Philip cleared his throat. Mallory leaned back and steadied herself.
“No. Hormonally, no.”
“Then what’s this idea of, you know, a woman can do everything a man can? Has to have everything a man has. I mean, aren’t we all different?”
“Sure, we’re different. But not that different.”
“Take Pansy and me. I’ve got the, ah, requirements you mentioned, she’s got a few I don’t have. So why are we trying to make everything the same?”
“It’s not about the same,” Mallory said. “It’s about things being equal.”
“That’s bullshit,” Joel said. “The way the world works—”
Pansy put her hand on his forearm.
“It’s all right,” Mallory said. “I’m not offended.”
Of course she was offended. She was angry, too, and that anger was clarifying. Philip had never revealed himself to her in this way, had never granted her this sort of grotesque, contemptible honesty. He would rather be polite and easygoing and squirrel away his prejudices, his anger, then whisper her name when he thought she could not hear.
Joel topped up his mug, then wriggled his crooked nose and sighed, as though he was doing everyone a favor. “The way the world works is this: Men are good at certain things, women at others. We’ve got so much money now, so much opportunity, that we forget that. Pansy and I went to the South Pacific last year and I’m telling you, people were happy there. There was none of this, you know, power suits and feminist shit. It was just men working, women raising kids. What’s wrong with that?”
“How much food did they have to eat?” Philip said, and Mallory fought the urge to roll her eyes. He was not wrong, Mallory thought, but it annoyed her that he was arguing the fine points, rather than the larger, more insidious one.
Philip went on: “Did they have running water?”
Fight him, Mallory thought. Scream at him. Call him what he is: an idiot. Do anything. Instead, Philip offered Joel the floor, as though a person in Joel’s state might use it to acknowledge the truth Philip had just raised. As though Joel might apologize.
“You’re still such a bleeding heart,” Joel said. He flicked his cards onto the carpet between them. “I forfeit. We forfeit.”
Philip grimaced but put his cards into the middle as well. Don’t let him run, Mallory thought. Don’t let him just take his ball and go home. But then Pansy put her hand down, too. Now only Mallory was left. She looked through her cards, pouted appreciatively, then placed them gently atop the scattered ones.
“We’ll have to play again tomorrow,” she said. “I was just learning how to see through the hormonal fog.”
The fire crackled; the wind knocked against the window. Joel’s eyes were bleary but bright, his face red. He leaned forward and smiled, then shook his head in a gesture of admiration. He turned to Philip and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t let this one go,” he said, in a voice so warm and good-natured it was almost as though the last ten minutes had not taken place.
Mallory woke around three in the morning. The fire had burnt down to just a few flickering embers. Moonlight reflected off the snow outside and lit the room in an eerie, aquatic blue. Pansy was asleep on her side, clutching a pillow to her chest like a child. Joel slept on his stomach, with his head jammed against his shoulder. Philip laid on his back on the couch, his hands folded across his stomach like a mummy. The room was much colder than it had been when they’d gone to sleep, or maybe she was just not quite as drunk anymore. After her and Joel’s argument, she hadn’t thought she’d be able to sleep, but the moment she closed her eyes on the couch it was like a curtain had fallen. Now she had to pee. She swung her legs off the couch and stood up. The room swayed slightly. She was in the strange, tenuous place between drunkenness and hangover, when one often finds themselves taken by a strange and specific hunger—for pickles, or martini olives, or French toast. She stepped gingerly past Joel and put a large log on the fire, then went down the hall to the bathroom. The cold toilet seat against her bare thighs jolted her fully awake.
Instead of going back to the couch, she decided to explore the upper floor. Along the staircase was a set of family portraits, one for each year, like an evolutionary diagram of Pansy’s family. On the first step, there was just a black and white photo of a man, a woman, and a baby. This photo was labeled 1947. By 1965, the family had grown to six. Which one was Pansy? Mallory peered at the photos, so close her breath clouded the glass. She walked up the stairs, one leg crossing over the others, waiting for one of those four little girls to transform into the person she recognized. There she was, sitting in the center of the family, her father’s hand resting on her shoulder. Mallory walked up a few more steps and watched Pansy’s older siblings marry, have children. The photos stopped about halfway up the stairs. Plenty of room, Mallory thought, for future generations, many happy returns.
At the top of the stairs there was a small wooden end table and on this, a gray and blue ceramic jug with a matching stopper. She put her hand on its smooth, frigid bulk. In one bedroom she found a queen bed stripped to the mattress, in another a pair of bare twin beds. In the third, a four-poster king-sized bed with a large, dark headboard. Each poster was capped by a small carved wooden pineapple. She went back into the room with the queen bed and sat down. Across from her there was a dark wooden dresser topped with a vase of dried flowers and a box of tissues in a cover. On the cover, inside an oval frame, there was a winter scene, an illustration of children sledding. Mallory thought of her sketchbook, which she’d left in the trunk of Philip’s car. She was overcome with the sudden urge to go downstairs and sketch them all as they slept. The mattress croaked under her weight. From here she could see out the back of the house, through the black trees to the unnaturally bare expanse of the snowed-over fairway.
A set of footsteps on the stairs. She kept her eye on the window. She knew Philip’s gait, the pressure he put on things, and this did not sound like him. He would have called her name, anyway, he would have let her know he was coming. The footsteps reached the top landing. Joel cleared his throat.
“Hi partner,” he said.
Mallory tilted her head toward the window. “Nice view.”
He stepped into the bedroom and closed the door behind him. She felt heat, sudden and undeniable, between her legs. He strolled, or affected strolling, toward her across the carpet, his steps soundless and assured, and then stopped so that he was directly above her.
“There’s something between us,” he said.
“Yes,” Mallory said. Joel was repulsive, he was beautiful, he was awful, she would have him.
“We ought to be quick,” he said, leaning down. His kiss was sweet and minty. He must have rubbed toothpaste in his mouth before coming upstairs. There was something too conciliatory, too thoughtful, about this gesture, and it almost ruined the whole thing. Almost.
It was too cold for them to fully undress, so instead Mallory pulled down her pajama bottoms and laid facedown across the bed. Joel slid in from behind and pressed her down into the bare mattress. Her hands kept slipping across the surface of the mattress, and she tensed to keep the springs from groaning. Still, it felt good. There was pleasure, both in the transgression and in the giving of herself to his bold, unadorned desire. A soft moan slipped from her lips, and Joel hissed something, and she resorted to biting the sleeve of her sweatshirt, which only intensified the furtive, aching thrill. Soon—much sooner than she would have thought, given how drunk Joel was—he came, whimpering into her hair.
“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks.”
He pulled up his pants and sighed. She took a few tissues from the box on top of the dresser and wiped his cum from between her legs.
“We should go back down,” she said.
“I’ll stay up here,” Joel said, his voice thick and sleepy. It was as though sex had set loose some extra store of drunkenness he had until then been holding back. He lay down on the bed and put his hands behind his head, then smiled up at her.
“It’s too cold up here. You have to come down.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Just a kip.”
Mallory tried to lift him by the shoulders, but he was resolutely heavy. Fine, she thought, freeze to death. She took the wad of tissues and went quietly back downstairs, past the rows of family photos. As she passed one of the more recent ones, she saw Joel’s face, which she had missed earlier. He peeked out from the back row, wearing an untroubled, sunny expression.
She found Pansy and Philip asleep in the same positions. The fire was burning steadily now—it looked like Joel had added another log before coming up. She tossed the mass of tissue paper into the embers, where it smoldered for a second and then went up in a bright and short-lived flare.
Mallory lay down on the couch and looked at Philip. He always slept with a troubled expression, and tonight was no different. She settled down into the couch, pulling the blanket tight around her neck. Philip opened his eyes, blinked, and looked at her. She tried to swallow but couldn’t. She could still taste the mint and whiskey from Joel’s kiss.
“The comb,” Philip mumbled, though it was hard to make out. His beard was matted against his face, and his voice was thick with sleep.
“What?” Mallory whispered. Had he said the comb or I’m home? Philip stared at her with a slack, almost bored expression, then rolled over, leaving her to ponder this alone.
Mallory woke late the next morning. The places where Joel and Pansy had slept had been cleared, and Philip’s section of the couch was empty, the blankets he’d used folded in a stack on one of the cushions. From this angle, she could see into the kitchen and the entryway. Philip was scrambling eggs at the stove, Pansy was on the phone again, presumably with Fiddle. Joel sat at the dining table, with a blue and white throw blanket over his head. If she lay completely still, no one would realize she was awake yet, and she felt a keen, childlike pleasure at being conscious but unnoticed, like the time she and one of her brothers had hidden from their mother inside a laundry room cabinet. They’d heard her mother sing “Good Morning,” from “Singing in the Rain,” to herself, just the chorus, over and over again. She and her brother—this was long before he started calling her The Dodo—had muffled their laughter as best they could, but soon they were found out. Their mother, red in the face, had marched them out of the laundry room by their ears. This childhood memory seemed to have the same substance and weight as what had happened the night before—neither seemed real. Maybe she hadn’t gone upstairs at all. Maybe that was all part of some drunken, disjointed dream. She slipped her hand gingerly down into her long johns and felt the crust of the semen she’d missed. She felt a plunging sensation, as though she had just leaned back a bit too far in a chair. She heard Philip set a plate of eggs in front of Joel.
“Why’d you let me do this to myself?” Joel said to him.
Mallory tried to sink deeper into the couch cushions, to disappear with the crumbs and spare change and skeins of lint.
“You’re up,” Philip said, pointing at her with his rubber spatula. He was wearing a frilly apron, yellow with little blue flowers printed on it. He looked so decent, so domestic, so harmless. Mallory hated him for his compliance and eagerness to provide, and she hated herself more for not wanting them. She got up slowly from the couch and felt her hair, which was tangled and greasy. Her scalp felt tender, her back stiff and sore. She was terribly, entirely awake.
“I’m bringing the car down to the gas station,” Philip said. He handed her a cup of coffee.
“All right,” Mallory said. Philip walked to the entryway and started putting on his coat. He was a good person, she thought. I do not deserve him.
She got up and sat across from Joel at the dining room table. He was staring at his eggs with an expression of alarmed concentration, as though they might make a break for it at any moment.
“I had too much,” he said. He looked up at her pleadingly from beneath his blanket. “Partner, I had too much.”
Philip came back and kissed the top of Mallory’s head.
“You’re all right for skiing after lunch?” he said.
“Sure,” Mallory said. Philip left. She heard the door close and the crunch of the snow as the car went down the driveway.
“We should talk,” Mallory said to Joel. Joel winced and tipped his head toward the other room, where Pansy could be heard berating someone on the phone.
“Not now,” he said. He held his hand out to her. It was a large, meaty hand, pink and soft. She took it, without really knowing why. He rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb.
“You’re a special person,” he said. “You should know that. But we’ve got to be careful about this.”
She looked at her hand in his. It depressed her to think that this gesture might have worked on someone before and probably would again. Joel looked out gravely from beneath his blanket. There was a prophet Joel in Sargent’s frieze of the saints. In the finished work, he stood with his head covered in a black cloth. His head was canted back, away from the viewer, with only his jaw revealed, and his left hand held the black cloth as though he were just about to pull it down fully over his face. Mallory preferred the study. In it, the cloth still covered his head, but his hands were free. He held them open in front of him, as though he were trying to feel his way through space. Two kinds of blindness—one designed, the other inadvertent. She thought of explaining this to Joel, and then she began to laugh.
“Are you going to let me in on this joke, or?” Joel said.
“It’s nothing,” Mallory said, struggling to stifle her laughter. A sour expression crept up his face, and he rose and scraped his eggs into the trash.
In the other room, Pansy had finally gotten ahold of Fiddle.
“Fiddle, I’m disappointed,” she said.
Mallory had never been cross-country skiing before. It had seemed easy enough, but now, trailing behind Philip, her legs burning and her back aching, she saw that there was a reason people always touted it as exercise rather than experience. The world was silent, save for the sound of her breath and the long, hissing strides of her skis. They were on a groomed trail that ran just behind Pansy’s house, along the fairway of the fourth hole. Pansy had given them directions to the lake. Neither Pansy nor Joel had joined them—Pansy had to wait for Fiddle, and Joel had begged out on account of his hangover. So now it was just Mallory and the man she had betrayed the night before, enjoying a bracing cardiovascular workout.
Pansy had given Mallory her mother’s pink and navy snowsuit, which fit in the hips but was too baggy in the crotch, so that Mallory could not fully extend her legs. She was hot, her face was cold, her nose was running. She distracted herself by focusing on Philip’s ass, which looked magnificent in his borrowed gray snowsuit. I will miss that ass, Mallory thought.
They passed empty houses, chunks of granite covered in snow like pieces of cake, half-collapsed snowmen left behind weeks earlier by other winter vacationers. Animal tracks, a few red berries on a bush. The trees were dark, the houses brown, the sky grey, as though the whole world had conformed to the resort’s strict color code. Philip led them onto a narrow path through the woods, which emptied onto a curving road. They had come to the lake. They skied down a small hill and set out across it.
After the slightly undulating golf course, the perfectly flat surface of the lake was disorienting. On every side, the trees seemed to rise up around her, as though she was at the bottom of a bowl. The sky above was a bright, featureless gray. On the fresh snow her skis felt sluggish and heavy and she longed for the trail. Her lungs burned. She told herself, once again, that she really had to stop smoking.
She tried not to think about the night before, but the monotonous rhythm of their progress made this nearly impossible. Left leg, she thought of the bare mattress against her cheek, right leg, she thought of telling Philip. Left leg, she would, right leg, she wouldn’t. Left, right, left, right. She stopped. Thin snot ran from her nose and chilled on her lip. She bent over and bit the sleeve of her jumpsuit so hard her jaw ached. When she looked up, Philip was still proceeding into the distance. Good, she thought. Go.
Then he stopped. He turned perpendicular to his track and waved at her. He shouted something at her, but she could not make out what. He started skiing back to her.
“Is everything alright?” he said. There were little pebbles of snow in his beard.
“It’s fine,” Mallory said. “Just a bit more of a workout than I thought.”
Philip nodded. He licked his lips, then brushed some snow from his mustache.
“Let’s turn around,” he said.
“No, I’m fine.” She straightened up and pointed the way forward with her ski pole. Philip did not move.
“I need to talk to you,” he said.
“OK,” Mallory said. Her heart beat in her throat. The wind was a roar in her ears. Philip knew. Maybe he’d been awake the whole time. Maybe Joel had told him that morning. Or maybe she was completely wrong, maybe he was about to propose to her. Of course—why hadn’t she thought of this? A scenic vista, a friendly couple to celebrate with. It was so obvious; it was so much worse. Philip took a deep breath.
“I slept with Liza,” he said.
She was grateful, suddenly, for her ski poles. Without them she would probably have toppled over into the snow. Philip winced and looked back the way they had come.
“You’re fucking Fucking Liza?”
“Just once,” Philip said. “Well, twice. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Why would you tell me in the middle of a lake?”
Philip opened his mouth, but he could not explain. She should have been angry, she knew that, but what she felt was relief, even wonder. She was amazed at how badly she wanted to hurt Philip. Driving the spiked tip of her ski pole into the meat of his thigh, that would be good. Maybe punching him in the face, also. She would not do any of those things, but she wanted to, and that felt glorious. Philip began to cry. She watched him cry and she wanted to cry, too. She kissed him. The little bits of ice in his beard melted against her cheek. She was, she realized, in love with him. Oh no, she thought.
They got lost on the way back. This happened so simply, so easily, that it seemed like a joke Philip was playing on her. The sun had begun to set while they were out on the lake, and soon the trees seemed to multiply. The empty houses offered no landmarks. It began to snow, lightly at first, and then in denser flurries that swept, balletic, across the shrouded landscape. They took one fork by a house Mallory was sure she recognized, only to end up on a long flat road they had never seen before. They turned around and then couldn’t find the trail they had just left. Mallory felt the first prickle of panic rise in her chest. She turned around again and started skiing.
“Where are you going?” Philip said.
“All these roads have to connect eventually,” she called back.
They skied past more dark houses, canoes capped in snow, wood piles and detached garages. They could break into one of these houses, Mallory thought, maybe use a phone or light a fire in the fireplace, but this seemed like a ludicrous solution. She was certain that after the next stand of trees, the next bend in the road, they would see a house with the lights on and smoke coming out of the chimney.
Instead, the road dead-ended at a large open lot. At the far end of this lot, under a corrugated metal awning topped by dim yellow sodium lights, there was a mound of trash bags. Snow had blown in under the awning and covered most of the trash. Off to the side was an office trailer, its windows dark, and a large hand-painted sign leaning on it: SORT YOUR PLASTICS, METALS, PAPERS! WE WILL NOT DO IT FOR YOU! After all that work, they had found the dump.
They made their way to the trailer, their skis crunching over the compacted snow in the parking lot. There was a faint light on inside, maybe a desk lamp or nightlight. At the trailer, she and Philip unclipped her skis, and she went up the slick wooden steps and knocked on the door. Through the door she could hear a man’s muffled voice.
“Hello?” she said, knocking on the door.
No one answered. The man inside carried on, uninterrupted. She knocked again, the impact muffled by her glove. Still no answer. She turned the handle—locked. It was fully night now, the world black and impenetrable past the sodium lights on top of the metal awning. A few fresh, gleaming black trash bags sat on top of the older, snowier ones, their glossy edges catching the wan, corrosive light.
Philip walked awkwardly around the side of the trailer and picked up a rusty shovel.
“Step back,” he said. He took the shovel like a spear and jabbed it into the window, which cracked but did not shatter.
“What are you doing?” Mallory said.
“There’s probably a phone inside,” Philip said. He stabbed at the glass again. The window gave way. Some of the glass fell into the cabin, where it landed with a tinkling crash; the glass that fell out onto the snow landed without a sound. The man they had heard was a radio. “Snow in Center Sandwich tonight, snow elsewhere,” said a small, indifferent voice. Philip used the edge of the shovel head to clear the jagged glass from the window frame, then tried to hoist himself up, but couldn’t manage.
“Lift me up,” Mallory said.
Philip looked at the window, then back at her.
“Right,” he said, then started taking off his jacket.
“What are you doing?”
“The glass,” Philip said. He tossed his jacket so that it hung over the window frame. “Watch for it when you go in. Here’s ten fingers.”
He knit his hands together to create a platform. Mallory put her hands onto his shoulders and stepped onto his hands, and he hoisted her roughly into the window frame.
Just inside the window there was a simple plastic folding table, which was now covered in broken glass. The wind had blown papers all over the trailer. A corkboard opposite the window was bristling with notes, receipts, Polaroids. In the corner of the trailer, an enormous man stood with his hand on his hip, staring straight at her. Mallory tried to back out of the window, but Philip kept lifting her. When her eyes adjusted to the light, the man revealed himself to be a cardboard cutout of Kevin McHale. Next to this was a gray filing cabinet, the silver keys still hanging in the lock. Perched on top was a red portable radio. There was no phone.
Mallory brushed as much glass as she could from the table, then pulled herself forward until she could lift her leg out of Philip’s hands. She pulled her legs gingerly through the window and then climbed down off the table, rushed to the door, and unlocked it. Philip stumbled in, rubbing his arms, then grabbed his jacket from the window. He turned it inside-out and brushed the glass off with the back of his hand. Then he began to laugh.
“Two amateur skiers were found dead today,” he said. “They are survived by a Volvo, various sweaters, and two copies of Gaucho on cassette.”
“I hate that record,” Mallory said. “I’ve always wanted to tell you that.”
Phillip’s jaw tightened. “I am really sorry.”
Now, Mallory thought. Tell him now. Or now. Now.
She wanted to, she really did. But then a pair of headlights swept across the trailer. A small red pickup trundled across the gray lot and parked directly in front of the trailer. From this truck stepped a small, ferret-like New Englander with dark, gleaming eyes. He wore a navy blue work jacket lined with yellowing sheepskin. His name was embroidered in cursive on the left breast: Fiddle.
“That window you?” he said, pushing his lower lip out with his tongue.
“We thought there’d be a phone inside,” Philip said.
Fiddle squinted. “The hell’d you think that?”
They got good at telling the story, or at least a version of it. Philip and Mallory, lost in the well-heeled wilderness, breaking into a trailer, only to be saved by a man named Fiddle. Together they described the eerie flatness of the lake, the mounting panic as they tried to find their way home, the ride back to Pansy’s with Fiddle. They sat three abreast on his bench seat, and he’d told them how the lake they’d skied across had once been a river, but they’d dammed that up. What did he smoke? Philip would say, and Mallory would reply, Virginia Slims 120s, and then they would both quote Fiddle in unison: “They burn slower, and I like to savor it.”
There was a great deal missing from the story, of course. Philip never included the conversation they had on the lake, about sleeping with Liza, and Mallory never mentioned—to anyone, not even Philip—what she’d done the night before with Joel.
The last time she saw Joel was at her and Philip’s wedding. He had come alone. Pansy had divorced him about a year after their trip to New Hampshire. Joel was sober now and was making his way through the Twelve Steps. He asked Mallory to dance.
Beneath the big white tent, they slow-danced to “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling.” Joel was a talented but showy dancer, too enamored with dips and twirls.
“I know you have to make amends,” Mallory said. Joel nodded, then dipped her backwards. She saw Philip looking at her, upside-down. Joel pulled her back up.
“Don’t tell him,” she said. “Please don’t.”
Joel spun her again, then brought her back to his chest.
“I always knew you’d be good,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you? From the minute I saw you. Now why would I go and ruin a thing like that?”