Fridays at Daily Kos sometimes usher in a little science; at Eschaton, Fridays almost always bring out the cats. It seems every second blog does something different Friday night--and it just so happens that I have an unpublished novel clogging up my hard drive. Its unread status is starting to tick me off. I'm going to have to contact agents soon, but before I dive into that unwelcome chore, I thought I'd share some of it here.
In any case, here's the first installment, in which the protagonist is introduced, and the circumstances of his distress are hinted at, and his girlfriend is precipitously left. Skip past the hump for the first chapter. Then let me know what you think: should I post another installment next week, or shouldn't I? Should I throw in the towel? I'd make a horrible exotic dancer, but if you think that's what I should be doing instead, just let me know.
Chapter 1
I could smell dust, and from somewhere, more faintly, the scent of burning leaves.
"Do you smell that?"
"The smoke? Of course. Where do you think it's coming from?"
"I can't tell."
Dawn and I stood on a small peak in the Stanford foothills, the sun heavy on our backs. The grass was brown and sere in the afternoon light, the sky a fierce electric blue. A red-tailed hawk circled overhead, and Dawn craned her head back to watch it, her throat fluted in the sun.
Then she shook herself abruptly. "Oh to hell with it, let's do something. I hate this, just standing here."
"Do you want to go back?"
"No." She slapped at an insect. "I just want to walk or something. You've been up here before, right?"
"Yeah."
"So show me something, why don't you?"
"All right." I thought a moment. Show her something? This wasn't a museum; it was a range of hills. Grass and trees and blue sky and low scrub--there was nothing else except--"How about a pond?"
"There's water up here?"
"Unless I was dreaming."
She laughed. "I wouldn't be surprised. But show me anyway."
She took my hand, or I took hers--I'm not sure anymore who moved first--and we walked down the hill and along a low ridge toward another hill, this one crowned with a stand of California oak.
They weren't anything special, just trees, but they were big, and gnarled with age, and Dawn said she wanted to climb one. She chose a low, spreading monster of a tree, easy to climb, easy not to fall out of, and we found a crook where we could sit together and look out over the sprawl on the peninsula below. Dawn pointed out landmarks on the campus--the quad, the athletic complex, and the clock tower. "Where's the dorm?" she asked. "Can you see it?"
I was squinting against the sun, trying to pick out the highway and figure out which way was north, but I nodded absently. Dawn snorted.
When I found it, a thin ribbon of black cutting through the sprawl, I touched her arm and pointed it out.
A quick glance, and she shook me off fiercely. "Don't remind me," she said, and pushed away from the tree and into the air. She grunted softly when she landed.
"You coming?"
"Yeah."
I dropped down beside her, and we walked in circles over the hills while I looked for landmarks. I'd only been here once before, and it wasn't precisely here that I'd been. The amount of space out here was fantastic. We passed a clay pit and the empty cement rim of what looked like a new reservoir--neither of which I'd seen before--then the mown edge of the local golf course. One more hill, and I found my bearings. I led the way past another pocket of trees and along a barbed-wire fence toward a small wood in the groin formed by two hills.
There was a stream-fed pond in the wood. I'd found it earlier that year, after--
Well, the thing is, it's kind of embarrassing. I mean, I got lost. My sister called, and we had this long, shitty conversation, and I had to get out. I just had to move. There was so much happening inside, and I didn't know what to do with it. So I went out, up into the hills, in sandals, with no water, no map, no compass--not that you really need any of that up here--you're never all that far from the civilized world . . . but the thing is, I didn't know that yet; I had no real sense of the amount of land up here, and I wasn't thinking clearly enough to pay attention to where I was going. The sun went down before I found my way out. I slept on lumpy ground in wet, prickly grass, and woke regularly, maybe a dozen times total, to stare up at the cold, blurry light of the stars.
Once, more awake than I wanted to be, I dug my glasses out of my pocket and tried to lose myself in the constellations. But I couldn't get out of the grass, couldn't reach the stars. It was one of those nights. I was as exhausted as I was jittery, and my head was crawling, zipping, racing every which way but sane.
In the morning, on the way out, I found the pond. This pond. It was invisible still, but it was there, through the trees. Dawn couldn't see what she was putting off. She was more interested in the decaying sweat lodge beside the path. She circled it intently while I waited.
"Who do you think built it?" she asked.
I shrugged. How should I know?
"There's no one around here. I mean, you'd really have to go out of your way--that's real leather, you know. Someone had to care to bring that up here."
"That wouldn't be hard," I said. "It's a nice place."
Dawn looked at the lodge skeptically. "I suppose. It's falling down, though."
I almost smiled. "I meant the pond. Don't you want to see it?"
"Yeah, sure. We're not going to figure this out just by looking at it."
"You've got that right," I said, and stepped around the lodge and into the trees, Dawn following, until we came to the top of the stairs, the decaying wood mossy in the shade. Halfway down, she stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.
"It's beautiful." Her voice was hushed, almost reverent.
We couldn't see the dam yet, only the pond, but with the trees leaning out over the water, the sun cutting through the trees stippled the water with the pattern of their leaves. It was the kind of natural elegance you forget after three months in off-white lecture halls.
"I built it just for you."
"Whatever." Dawn snorted.
At the bottom of the stair, she touched my shoulder again, and left my side trailing her fingers down my arm as she went. I shivered.
And then, to make things worse, at the pool's edge, Dawn stripped to her panties and sports bra and waded in. I hesitated a moment, then followed. The water was cold, and we were almost naked. Dawn's body wasn't new to me, but she was too near, too solid, too beautiful, and too unhappy. I wanted to hold her. For every possible reason, I wanted to hold her.
I couldn't do it, though. I didn't have the courage. I'd just broken up with her, and here she was, all but naked, trying hard to be nice, trying to be natural, and I didn't know what to do. I was leaving that night, and I didn't expect to come back.
It took Dawn a long time to get cold enough to come out, and then she spotted some blackberries on the bank above the dam, and clambered up to pick them. I was enjoying the sun on the dam, so didn't move except to watch her, amazed as always by her grace and her subtle strength. She ran to stay in shape, and danced for fun, and she had visible muscles along her spine and standing out from her calves.
She still hadn't put any clothes on.
And later, when we couldn't think of anything else to do, we played Pooh-sticks down the length of the fish ladder. It was my idea; Dawn hadn't read Winnie the Pooh.
"You really did have a deprived childhood," I said, which sounds stupid, I know, but made sense, given what I knew about her parents, and what she knew about mine.
Or maybe it really was stupid, because Dawn didn't answer. Her twig, a full inch longer than mine, was twisting and bobbing its way to victory. She paced alongside.
After I confirmed her win--"Nice one," I said--and she thanked me-- "You can kiss my fat ass. You're a loser; you'll always be a loser"--and after I laughed, and failed to tell her that she wasn't fat; or that I'd kiss her anywhere, anytime--after all that, Dawn returned to the pond alone to do slow, angry somersaults in the clear water.
She came out of the water with goose bumps, so I held her--I used the cold as an excuse to hold her--until she was warm and reasonably dry and said that she wanted to leave.
She was very businesslike now. Whatever she was thinking, it didn't involve begging me to stay until the end of time, and of the sun, and the stars. We'd been through all that the night before. And all of it, the weary and the pitiful, all of it--all of it--was predicated on my own stupidity. I'm telling you, I was a fool.
We pulled our clothes on awkwardly and walked out, following the trail through the golf course, up over the hills toward the obvious landmark of the radio telescope, then down the access road, the easy way home. We showered separately, then curled up together for a nap, spooning on Dawn's futon until one of my friends stopped in to say good-bye. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, and threw on a sweater, and allowed him to pull me away for an hour.
When I returned, Dawn was still asleep. I touched her awake, and she turned into my arms reflexively. We held one another and smiled quietly until I began to cry; then Dawn began to cry. The tears rolled silently down her nose to her lips, from which I kissed them while she quieted.
Neither of us said anything.
What was there to say?
We made pasta and a sauce of local vegetables, none of which were as good as they had been when I arrived at school at the end of summer. Zucchini and carrot and green bell pepper and tomato and onion and even avocado, though the avocado was harder than I would have liked. My hand slipped and I added too much oregano, but for once it didn't matter; Dawn said she didn't care. We had time to eat and to talk somewhat, but we didn't say anything that mattered. We took the time to do the dishes, then I carried my bags out to Dawn's beat-up Chevrolet, and she drove us north up Highway 101.
Barely five miles on, we saw the brake lights of a traffic jam burning in the dark ahead of us. Dawn swung hard right, cutting across two lanes of traffic to exit the freeway. We navigated across the peninsula to Highway 280, which ran parallel to 101 but through the hills, and all the while we spoke haltingly of things which no longer mattered. There was no traffic and no other lights but our own.
Then a deer stepped into the road in front of us, and Dawn slammed on the brakes. I slapped forward against the seatbelt while the car screeched to a halt, and the deer sauntered safely off the road and into the tall grass along the shoulder.
It was one of those moments when life seems to stop. In the glare of the headlights, I watched the grass sway with the deer's passage, and I had a brief, flashing vision of the deer stretched out before us on the highway, it's neck bent in the night. I could hear Dawn breathing raggedly, and I became aware that I wasn't breathing at all. The engine shuddered to a stop, and we sat in silence until another car swooped past.
Then Dawn shook her head. "I almost wish we'd hit it," she whispered. "I don't want you to go."
"It's not for me," I said.
And: "I promised."
And: "Emily needs me."
Dawn started the car. "If you have to you have to. But--"
"I'd stay if I could," I said. It was the truth. I loved her bitterly.
"Thank you," she said, and took another ragged breath, audibly pulling herself together. "Thank you for saying that. Is there anybody coming?"
I craned my neck. "No," I said, "you're good to go."
And that was that. Dawn drove quickly, but we arrived at the airport with so little time to spare that I had to run in with my luggage while she parked the car. This was in 1994--December, to be exact--and it was still possible to arrive at the airport only fifteen minutes before takeoff without being held up by endless lines at the security stations.
Dawn caught up with me at the gate, planted herself in front of me, and kissed me a you-haven't-left-yet kiss. Woman kisses man--young, stupid man--with saliva and tongue; man kisses back without irony or reservation. All the world gone, a rush of blood to the head. I forgot about Emily. Forgot about the flight to Providence. Forgot about everything, frankly, except Dawn--until the PA crackled to life, and they threatened to close the jetway, and I tore myself away and picked up my bags. I took three steps, and Dawn called me back. We kissed goodbye, a wholly different kind of kiss, more delicate, gentler, but still a ferment of saliva. Dawn was serious enough about it that I began to doubt my sanity.
Still, I was a fool. In that moment it was more important to be in Providence for my little sister. The family was hanging in the balance, and I no longer knew if college was a possibility. Emily was going to need someone to take care of her, and though I hoped that person wouldn't be me, I knew what I'd choose if there wasn't anyone else. It was all right, I told myself. I'd made my flight, and I would be in Providence, as promised. There would be time in the future for other relationships.
There would be time, in the future, for life to begin again.
...
End Chapter 1