Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [81]
She said, If you want one, say please.
Frank said, One say please.
So Stubblefield made him a wreath too.
Each evening during their time there, they ate shrimp, a new food to Luce, and she could not get enough of it. The children went to bed early, exhausted, and slept until dawn to the drowsy wave sounds rising from the beach. Way late, Luce and Stubblefield sat on the sofa of the beach cottage and listened to the radio and held each other, kissing like teenagers. Every song some variant of oh baby baby. But if Stubblefield went beyond a certain line, Luce was off to the bedroom to sleep with the children. Sweet about it, and sort of regretful, but off. Leaving Stubblefield to read and try to feel sort of gallant until he fell asleep.
Except one night, toward the end, she came back. Stubblefield dozed on the sofa with a paperback from his car library. He woke to Luce’s hand on his face, and then sliding down past the collar of his shirt to his shoulder. She gripped him at the muscle above the collarbone, and pulled him to her, which kind of hurt. Kissed him deep and said, One of these days it could be so good.
Before Stubblefield even roused awake, she was gone again. The door already closing behind her before he thought to say, Wait. Afterward, a restless late night for Stubblefield, with only the thin substitutes of poetry and Top 40 tunes on the radio.
Day by day, the money ran out. The last night, on the sofa before bedtime, Stubblefield told Luce a fairy tale about how they wouldn’t ever go back to the lake. Just start driving, and before you know it, be blasting westward at dawn down two-lane Nebraska blacktop. A pale moon setting up ahead and a bright yellow sun rising behind. Drinking truck-stop coffee and sharing a box of doughnuts for breakfast, three apiece. Listening to a radio station out of Red Cloud reporting wheat prices, and then Spade Cooley followed by the Sons of the Pioneers so as to capture in just two songs the exuberance and melancholy of the famed lone prairie with its match-strike daylight and night skies deep as the mind of God. You the tallest thing standing for miles across the sweeps of grass. And to let the place enter their dream lives, camp on blankets in a wheat field and watch stars and planets move westward across the slopes of convex space until they all fell asleep.
—Great, Luce said. Let’s do that, baby. Someday.
THEY WAITED UNTIL late afternoon to leave. By the time they were driving back through the dismal pine forests at the state line, it was dark. The kids slept on the backseat mattress, exhausted from another day on the beach. Luce spun the radio dial up through the frequencies and back down, over and over. Fractional blips of voice or music phasing in and out, interrupting the overall hiss and warp of interference. She wouldn’t say a word. She didn’t cry, but with every mile they drove north, dread filled the car like floodwater rising.
Stubblefield tried to draw her close. She felt like one solid muscle resisting the pull. But as soon as he took his hand away from her shoulder, she let go, quit clutching into herself, and leaned to him.
Luce said, I asked why you’re not married, but you didn’t ask me.
—I’ve been too glad about it.
—Yeah, well. There’s probably about twenty reasons, but do you want to know one of them?
—If you want to tell me.
—I’m not talking about what I want. Do you want to know?
—Yes, I do.
So Luce gave him the story in brief. The room over the drugstore beside the movie theater. The library with the tiny librarian. The telephone office in the former hotel with the dark hallways. The wall of Bakelite plugs, the cot, and the quilt. Mr. Stewart and the Saint Christopher medallion. No anger, no emotion. Just the facts.
By way of conclusion, Luce said, I lived through it, so if you can’t stand to hear