Sex & Violence Page 10

  “What’s your best track event?” I asked, as we headed into the brush. Though I was a little freaked, I decided I should go first, being the man and all.

  “The 1500,” she said.

  I thought to ask her time on that but didn’t want to one-up her with mine. Plus, what if hers was better? I was taller than her by a lot, but still. I hadn’t told her I ran track—had I? I didn’t think I had. Pot made it harder to talk for me than usual, but Baker could be pretty pushy with her questions.

  “But my favorite’s the long jump,” she added.

  Of course it is, I thought. Imagining those ponytails flying behind her as she whooshed through the air and wondering why I’d agreed to do this. While Baker made me laugh, she also made me nervous, especially when she started in on her rules, which she was doing as we pushed through pricker bushes and clouds of gnats.

  “People shouldn’t sleep with their significant others’ friends,” she said.

  I guessed this was about to be a rant against Jim and Conley. A discussion I wanted nothing to do with. “Oh, should there be a rule about that or something?” I said, all smarmy.

  “Yes,” she said. “A clear one too. Because it’s terrible. Even if the whole secretive thing’s hot; it’s not worth it.”

  She was completely wrong about that, but whatever. I wasn’t up for an argument.

  “Yeah,” I said, swatting at a horsefly.

  “Don’t sound so convinced, Evan!”

  “Well, what do you want me to say?” I asked.

  “Anything!” she yelled back. “It’s common courtesy to reply when someone speaks to you!”

  Fucking unbelievable. Because I doubted she wanted to know my opinion on this. Which was that I never cared if girls I got down with had a boyfriend. I’d never even bothered to ask. It didn’t bother me in the slightest, who was fucking who, as long as I was involved in some of the fucking, really. It was pretty insane, how long I’d skated by without that kind of information mattering.

  “All right,” I said, exhaling for a long time. “It’s probably not the best idea, getting down with your friend’s chick. But people get too crazy about sex stuff in the first place. I mean, it’s not like you’re getting married in high school. This isn’t Kentucky, right? Shit happens sometimes.”

  “Wow, Evan,” she said. “That’s the most I’ve heard you say in one breath.”

  “Well, you asked,” I said.

  “Don’t be so touchy … ” she said. “Oh my god, look!”

  I pushed aside a twisted branch, and there in front of us was the biggest ruin of a house I had ever seen in my life.

  As we walked around the Archardt House, Baker did all this oh-my-god!-ing. I couldn’t blame her. The place was amazing, beyond gothic. Slate black roof and dark brick and a round, pointy turret to one side and a sunken gate all around it. Windows everywhere, stained glass and ornately shaped, all reflecting back the wild green surrounding us.

  “Can you believe this? Holy fuck!” she said. “An intact piece of history—here on a bird sanctuary! Aren’t you glad we did this?” Her eyes were wide and hopeful, a really pretty blue.

  I was glad, yeah. But I was annoyed with her. And I couldn’t stop staring at her. Her boobs popping up under her T-shirt. Those crazy-hot ponytails of hers that I just felt like grabbing. I felt like an animal alone on this island with her. Plus I hadn’t taken a bath because my father and Brenda Trieste were out on our deck playing Parcheesi until three in the morning. With all the sweating I’d just done to get to the Archardt House, I probably reeked worse than ever.

  Still, when Baker climbed over a pile of bricks by the broken main gate, I followed her. Maybe I was nutless, but I didn’t need to advertise it.

  At the giant front door, a thick rusty chain looped through the door handles and was secured by a broken padlock. It looked like something you’d need a tetanus shot to touch, but Baker just threaded it out of the door handles and dropped it on the stone steps in a shower of rust flakes. Then she tried the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Which wasn’t surprising—the door was huge, like in a movie where the heroes storming the castle have to bash it in with a giant tree. Probably the latches were rusted or the wood water-warped. Or maybe it was just locked, the owner having taken the key long ago. Maybe it was one of those skeleton keys, lost in some antique shop in the middle of Vermont. The idea of which I kind of loved but figured Baker would hate.

  “Let me try,” I said. I pushed against the door while pressing into the handle, and it busted open.

  “What the … ?” she said.

  I shrugged, like I did things like that all the time and moved aside so she could go first.

  “I hate it when guys do that,” Baker said, stepping into the Archardt House.

  “Do what? Display their awesome masculine strength?” I asked, like a cocky bastard. “Or insist on ‘ladies first?’”

  But she didn’t answer. Because we were inside the Archardt House and it was amazing.

  “Amazing” wasn’t quite right, though. Because it was a wreck. Dull with dust. Rusty and musty and sad. I could hear something flutter above us, as if the place was full of mice and owls and bats.

  But the amazing part was the structure itself. The house was enormous. We were standing at the bottom of the biggest staircase I’d ever seen. White marble steps with an ebony banister and newel posts with carvings of bows and arrows. Not ergonomic or child-safe but still beautiful. A gloomy chandelier hung above us, rattling slightly as if there were birds roosting in it. Empty gaslights lined the walls.

  Baker and I stood there, our backs to each other, staring, as dusty yellow light seeped in through the high windows.

  “I wouldn’t try those stairs,” I said.

  “Aren’t you dying to see what’s up there?”

  “I’m completely creeped the fuck out, to be honest,” I said, looking down at the rotted, dark carpet, beneath which squiggles of moss grew between flagstones. Baker pushed away from me, then, and sighed contentedly, as if she couldn’t take in enough of the place. There was an old mirror, discolored and dark, above a small table. I saw my reflection—scraped-bald head, pointy elf ears, bumpy nose—and the house behind me, darker, dirtier, dustier. The walls were empty, the windows curtainless. Baker’s rubber boots crunch-squeaked on the stone floor, and I followed her into a larger room off the entryway.

  It was flooded with light from a giant picture window that looked over a weedy patio of broken flagstones and crumbling pillars. There were two rotted-out camelback sofas, bits of fabric barely holding the structures together. A fireplace that was twice as tall as me, with a cluster of fireplace tools and a heap of ashes in the hearth—I wondered if those could be carbon dated, and we could get the true time of the last fire in this house. I thought of saying as much, but then wondered if that wasn’t right and Baker would laugh at me.

  The sitting room also had a large black grand piano, with a candlestick holder on it, the kind you see people carrying around in scary movies. The piano bench was upholstered in faded-to-gray black velvet. I ran my hand along the dust on the piano in a long streak.

  “I wonder what’s in here,” she said, stepping toward a doorway.

  “Baker, wait!”

  She smiled. “Are you scared, Evan?”

  “It wasn’t clear from the ‘completely creeped the fuck out’ comment?”

  She laughed and I followed her again through another hallway until we were in an enormous kitchen. A wide prep island topped with a slab of white marble had a rack of copper pots hanging above it. There was a huge old-fashioned furnace oven and reddish slate floor tiles, porous and stained. The sinks were enormous enough to lie down and bathe in.

  “Gross.” She pointed to a dead mouse in a drain.

  “Aren’t you going to take pictures?” I asked. “Not of the mouse, I mean.”

  “Yeah, I will. I want to see everything first, though.”

  We continued exploring. Baker especially liked
the pantry and the laundry room and the summer kitchen building out back—she talked at length about the servants that would be needed, how they’d can tomatoes and make jam in the summer kitchen instead of heating up the main kitchen in hot weather. I liked listening to her nerd out about this, because it gave me a reason to look at her that wasn’t pervy and meant she wasn’t lecturing about rules or patriarchy or how she would like to pin all of womankind’s woes right on the head of my penis.

  “Let’s go upstairs.” Words Dirtbag Evan would have loved for any girl to say, in any other parallel place and time that was not an old dump of a house on a mosquito-ridden lake island. I told her I’d pass.

  “I’ll go first if you want,” she bargained. “I weigh less, so the stairs should support me.”

  “Thanks a lot.” I acted wounded. “You have no idea how hard I work to get this skinny.”

  She laughed. “How could you get any skinnier? Go eat something. I’ll holler if I need anything.”

  I told her I’d watch her go up the stairs to make sure she made it, and then I did, trying not to look at her ass but doing it anyway. Acting like staring at her wasn’t pervy but constituted a kind of safety issue, which it was, but not more than 20 percent of it was true concern. The other 80 percent was me contemplating why American society allowed women to wear certain things without it being illegal and how great that was and how life would be in one of those Muslim nations where women were required to live out their days underneath the clothing equivalent of a tablecloth and even with non-monogramy, did Jim Sweet know what a huge dumbass he was?

  I went outside and ate a sandwich and drank some water and tried to read some E. Church Westmore, but the sun was too bright and I couldn’t focus, so I walked around the house. I could hear birds chirping and bugs humming. It felt good to move around, even though my shoes were getting muddy. I wasn’t going to be on an indoor track anytime soon, though I probably should take a run and see where I was at. I thought about asking Baker to come pace with me but then worried she’d ask why I was so out of shape. Or that she’d wipe the floor with my ass and I’d feel like a complete loser next to her boyfriend the quarterback. Or ex-boyfriend. Whatever the fuck—their non-monogramous thing made me nervous. I never brought up Jim Sweet and Conley to her, and not just because his name made me giggle like a four-year-old. I told myself that Baker probably thought about it enough already.

  Behind the Archardt House was a big oak tree surrounded by patches of moss. I sat down beneath it, scraping mud out of the treads of my shoes with a twig. It was shady and cool, and I was worn out. Being around Baker—being around anyone, actually—made me buzz with tension. The idea that she was near and available, but not in my face, was nice, though. Though we were trespassing, though she had a kind-of-boyfriend, I felt okay for the first time since we’d moved. Like I’d outrun something bad, and now I could relax. I took out old E. Church and stuffed my backpack under my head and started reading.

  E. Church was discussing Pearl Lake’s past as a logging operations route, due to its connection with the Beauchant River, and that the deepest parts of the lake on the north side had many logs that had sunk to the bottom before they could be transported downstream. These logs hadn’t rotted because the depth was too cold for the microorganisms that do such work. I thought about all those thwarted logs, stacking uselessly at the bottom of the lake, untouched by any sawmill, left abandoned and to themselves.

  Safe.

  From inside the house, I could hear Baker yelling, “Evan, you’re totally missing out. Come back. I’ve got to show you this shit! Evan!”

  I just smiled. And for a moment Jim Sweet and his fucking fists and his oversized wingman were as far from me and Baker Trieste as …

  I must have drifted off, because I woke up startled, hearing voices. I looked at the tree wavering green leaves above my head and didn’t know where I was for a minute. I’d been dreaming about the cupcake shop in Tacoma. Collette had walked in, carrying one of my Uncle Soren’s hand-carved pipes. She said she was disappointed, because she never received one letter from me after all this time. Her face was bruised and a smeary tear dripping with eyeliner crawled down her freckled cheek and I was trying to tell her how sorry I was, but I couldn’t speak. It was as if my voice box had been removed.

  My face was wet with tears. Jesus, I was crazy. I quick wiped all the weepiness away with my T-shirt. The good feeling I had before falling asleep was gone, and now I just felt stupid and worried that Baker would find me bawling in the dirt.

  Then I noticed some words carved on the tree above my head. Squinting, I twisted my head to make sense of them: Soren & Melina.

  “Evan! There you are,” Baker shouted.

  I sat up then, my head knocking into the tree trunk.

  “Sorry. I kind of dozed off.”

  I stood up and rubbed my head and Baker started jabbering about the upstairs and all the photos she’d taken and that Tom had texted he was on his way, but she was so happy because this was awesome and I was awesome for coming with her and we should come back again tomorrow!

  Then she hugged me and her hair was soft under my chin and I tried to hug her back so she wouldn’t feel how tense I was, but before I could formulate how to do that, she disentangled from me and we started walking while she continued describing the upstairs.

  “There are seven bedrooms total,” she said. “One is a nursery; you should have seen the cradle. It was beautiful. The dresser’s full of baby clothes and blankets—a whole handmade layette. I have no idea how they’ve stayed preserved, but the roof of the house is intact, and there weren’t any broken windows up there, which I think is strange, don’t you?”

  I nodded, but she barely noticed. She rambled on about the master bedroom and the fireplace and the bow-and-arrow carvings in ebony wood, and it would’ve been boring, if she weren’t so cute and excited about it.

  “And, oh, I almost forgot,” she added. “There’s a library on the main floor. On the other side of the staircase? I thought it was a coat closet, but they didn’t use closets in that time period and it’s just a really dark hallway. I didn’t get a chance to look at all the titles. Do you have any water? I’m super thirsty.”

  I handed her my water bottle, and she chugged it. We were almost to Tom’s drop-off point. The relaxed feeling I’d had before started coming back. But only a little. Because the thought of Soren & Melina made my stomach drop. I looked at my watch.

  “Is that an Ironman? Are you a runner?” She grabbed my wrist to check out my watch.

  “Yeah.” I wished she’d stop touching me.

  “Evan, why are you always so silent and mysterious?”

  “I’m not mysterious. I’m just … economical.”

  She laughed. “So, what? You run long distance? Marathons?”

  “I used to do track,” I said.

  “What events?”

  “The mile.”

  “Really? What was your best time?”

  “I can’t remember,” I said.

  “Bullshit.”

  She kept bugging me to tell her, and I wouldn’t, so we stood there getting aggravated by each other for a while.

  “What do you mean the mile was your best?” she asked. “Don’t you still do it?”

  “Not currently.” I felt edgy. Feeling like it was weird how we didn’t know each other that well, but she was hugging me and getting all personal and I was exhausted from avoiding her questions. And now I had a question of my own, carved on a tree on an island in the middle of Pearl Lake.

  “How old are you, anyway, Evan?”

  “Eighteen. It was my birthday last week.”

  “What?” she said, in a delighted-but-outraged way that told me that, should she have any rules about birthdays, I would soon be learning them.

  “Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who’s all blasé about their birthday. I hate that. I mean, really, it’s insulting, because like we wouldn’t do something special for you! Why di
dn’t you say anything?”

  “Because I’m not six years old?”

  “We could have made you a cake at least.”

  “Who’s we?” I asked. “You and Jim Fucking Sweet?”

  Her eyes darkened, and she turned away.

  I knew I’d been a prick, so I didn’t say anything more. I knew I should apologize, but I didn’t really want to know what the deal was with her and Jim, anyway. I didn’t want to hear about their non-monogramy, and sure as hell didn’t want to get caught in the middle, taking sides or judging or whatever. The whole thing was crazy and too fucking familiar. So we didn’t say one more thing to each other, not even when Tom pulled up, not a word the entire time, even when we reached the shore.

  Dear Collette,

  I liked running. Not because I’m super healthy or competitive. It just seemed like a good thing to do. Like, physically. Like I knew I could outrun a killer or whatever. Or that my body would work the way I wanted it to work. I don’t know. I didn’t think about it a lot. I do now, but only because my body’s all fucked up and I can’t just do whatever I feel like doing anymore.

  Anyway, watching you long jump used to totally turn me on. Which is gross to say, but it was a beautiful thing. Really, I’m not kidding. I don’t know how you did that. Or how anyone does that. I didn’t used to think of myself as such a fearful fucker, but I think I am. Have always been one.