Part 67 (1/2)

Because it was Friday and on Fridays I loved you

I ironed your s.h.i.+rts and folded your troubadour ties.

Earthbound,

I went for a walk, left hot chocolate on the stove,

Papers neatly pulled away, put away,

Everything

Very neatly

Very very neatly

Put away.

Maybe someday

One day

Down the years some Sunday

You might think of me

Too as neatly put away

As if I never existed.

As if I were just one more thing in your life.

That had come and gone.

Memories like flowers.

Love like lime blossoms.

PART IV.

MISS SILVER CITY.

What fresh h.e.l.l is this?

Dorothy Parker.

Chapter One.

1.

The Walker.

Larissa dreamed she was dreaming, lying on her back staring at the ceiling and sash windows with white transparent curtains, hearing the subzero freezer humming downstairs, the pattering noise of the shower through the partly open door, and when she opened her eyes, she found herself under the cream yellow quilt with golden petunias, goose down and starched white sheets and four pillows under her head. She felt her well-washed silken sheets under her palms and jumped out of bed, seeing the bookshelves, not yet emptied of stories, and her dresser by the window that had a view of green sloping golfing hills and downstairs a boy's voice instigating an eager dog to bark. ”Speak, Riot, speak!” And she did. Larissa, still in her silk nightgown, ran downstairs, and found the three children around the granite island with Emily serving cold cereal in plastic bowls. ”Plastic bowls for easy clean-up, Mommy,” she said, smiling a bright new morning. ”So you won't have as much to do when we leave for school.”

Larissa felt profound relief, like a torrent pouring down from her heart to her numb arms hanging by her sides. Thank you, G.o.d, she mouthed, standing barefoot in her kitchen, her stomach falling as though she had been thrown from a plane, falling and falling, staring at them, extending her fingers to reach for Michelangelo's curly head. Thank you.

She lay in a small hard bed, with gray sheets so stiff and new they abraded her on her back and her bare thighs. The crooked blinds were partly open. The room was dark because the windows faced west and it was morning, and wintertime. No, that was wrong, it was summertime, it was July.

Everything was askew. Was it even morning? Or was it evening? Was the third day the seventh? Because wasn't she supposed to rest on the seventh day, which was now a Tuesday? Was black white and white black? Were tears joy or joy tears? Was lack of money really wealth, was a surfeit of love really a dearth of it? Or was there a dearth of love?

She didn't know. And before she got up, she studied the ceiling, granite gray and cracking, like the walls, like the curtains, like the sheets. Who thought it was a good idea to paint everything gray?

Larissa. She was the one who had painted it. Kai wanted a manly color that wasn't blue. So she picked gray. Was the whole cottage like this? What a travesty. Crawling out of bed, she walked naked past the window, indifferently glancing outside to the blue lake, spilled out in an expansive ink stain, and beyond it the foggy Alpine hills and rolling plains asymmetrically arranged for maximum beauty. Except it was July, which was January. Nothing was beautiful in January. It was just waiting for beautiful to begin. It was cold in the housea”to save money they turned off the heat at night. As she walked to the radiator to twist the hissing k.n.o.b open, she recalled herself on Burns Street in Hoboken, bending the same way, but eighteen years younger and two cold, squalling children fuller. Michelangelo wasn't even a curly thought back then. They didn't know how they would pay next month's rent. Later they had joked that if they had had him, they might have sold him.

When Kai and Larissa first got to Jindabyne, they felt lucky because they found this place right away, on the peak of a hill overlooking the silver lake, in a cul-de-sac in solitude, three hundred feet above sea level, at the very tip of a dead-end street named Rainbow Drive. Even the name of the street was optimistic. Behind the ash-colored greening eucalyptus stood a little old bungalow; the weatherboard romance of it attracted them. So secluded! Up on a hill! Private. Tiny. Removed. Distant. Far away. The view was a plus, a bird's-eye glance at the ever-changing lake, the clear of Jindabyne, bluer than blue, and when they stood on their tiptoes at the edge of their property and tilted their heads, they could see the church steeple down left in town center, four miles away by the banks of the lake. It was splendid.