The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [40]
Of course, Geraldine knows all. She is a tribal enrollment specialist and has everyone’s secrets alphabetically filed. I must, in fact, call upon her expertise for many questions of blood that come my way. A few days later, I visited her office. I nodded as I entered the room and Geraldine glanced away.
“I’m Antone Coutts,” I said.
“Yes,” she answered.
Her eyes, black and upslanted in a pale, cool face, rested on me with an odd intensity, but no warmth. There was no sign of friendliness, although she made a gesture. Raised her eyebrows a fraction. That day, she was wearing a rose pink dress belted at the waist with a black tie. She wore sheer stockings and low black heels. She had on a gardenia perfume that left behind the suggestion of moist vegetation. A woman who smelled tropical, here in North Dakota. I watched her leave the office and Margaret Lesperance, who’d seen me rebuffed, said in a sympathetic tone, “Her old uncle is probably waiting outside for her.” At the time, I thought Margaret said it just to cover the awkward moment. It seemed obvious that Geraldine wanted nothing to do with me. But later on I found that her uncle really had been waiting for her, and of course, she intended to get to know me all along. Yes, she had tried to avoid me, but the reason was not, as I imagined, the way she viewed my past or thought about my family. She was cool because that was her way. She was a woman of reserve.
It took a long time before Geraldine would even talk to me, longer still before she’d sit down and drink a cup of coffee in my presence. At a conference in Bismarck she finally had dinner with me—I’d maneuvered into the hotel smorgasboard line right behind her and when she walked over to a table I stuck tight. We talked of general and familiar subjects, getting acquainted, but all the while I longed to say, “I’m going to marry you, Geraldine Milk, and you are going to marry me.”
Though impatient, I managed to keep my interest hidden. I heard the Milk girls had tempers, and I did not want to begin by sparking hers. After the conference, when we returned home, I boringly kept an appropriate distance, though sometimes I thought I’d die of all I didn’t dare say in her presence. My love of her uncle’s music helped—I often went to sit with him in the evenings. At other times I dropped by his house early in the mornings, made a pot of strong tea or took him out to breakfast. That was on the weekends. The first time Geraldine showed up at her uncle’s house and found me there, I faked an elaborate surprise. She was not fooled.
“Are you here for a haircut, Judge? I brought my trimming shears.” She drew a pair of scissors from her purse and snapped them in the air. I felt like telling her she could do anything she wanted to me. I am pretty sure she read this in my expression and took pity. She put the scissors down.
“Do you like to fish?” I asked her. Maybe it was an odd way to get to know a woman, but I was suffering.
“No,” she said.
“Would you like to go fishing anyway?”
“All right.”
So the next day we went out together in a cousin of mine’s fishing boat, a little aluminum outboard with a 45-horsepower motor. She had on rolled-up jeans, a starched plaid shirt. Her hair was a curled graceful shape that brushed her shoulders. She wore a deep red lipstick and no other makeup, and I thought that if she let me lean toward her in the boat I would hold her face, graze her lips with the side of my thumb, look into her eyes, and slowly kiss her. I was picturing just what I’d do, when she said, “Watch out,” sharply. We’d just missed a rock, which I knew was there, and she shook her head.
“You’ll hang us up, Judge.”
“I’m not a hanging judge.”
“You know