STARSHOWER

The car lurches up the steep dirt road: tires slip, rocks ping against the oil pan. Hissing leaves brush metal and glass, crowding out the sky. Like a witches’ forest that will eat you, Joelle remembers thinking the last time they were here; now, though, she can’t summon up that remembered fear, can’t summon up anything.

"My God, what a ride," Alan shouts, as if he’d gladly sacrifice the car for the thrill of this twisting climb.

The engine quiets when they’ve got to level ground at last, moving slowly alongside a stand of sharp-scented pines. "Old man Holst’s penance," Alan says, as if to himself, but Joelle nods. Ray, who owns the place, told them how his father planted the trees after he’d let a grass fire get out of control until it burned everything in this field. Now, fully grown, standing on a floor of their discarded needles, the pines might have been there for centuries.

Joelle is surprised by her own excitement when she sees the patch of white amid the green. Through the pine boughs the small house has the fairy tale look it wore in her memory: white shingles, black shutters, a steep, gabled roof. Ray said he made some changes since their last visit but it’s only after they’ve parked and come around the back that they see he’s enlarged the upstairs room and put on a balcony. Joelle looks hard at the addition but she can’t honestly remember what that part of the house looked like before. What she does remember is the stone wall put up centuries ago by the settlers who tried to farm this steep, rocky land and the thick forest that grew up after they left. Somewhere in those woods a bird cries, a short sharp note followed by a long one; then there’s only the rustling of trees.

"I love it," Alan says. "We’re so alone even God can’t see us."

Inside the house, the smell immediately takes her back to the last time they were here: a vague essence of something like cheese, a hint of cedar and the ashes of a thousand fires. Joelle feels the weight of five years gone by and her eyes well up with tears.

"I guess I should take this upstairs." Alan is carrying her suitcase, a honeymoonish gesture. He doesn’t have to do all this, she wants to tell him. In fact, it irritates her--she can’t help remembering the time just after his affair with Louise. How distant all that seems now. When she found out about it Joelle thought it was the worst thing she could imagine. She stands by the fireplace; through the Dutch door she hears the insects’ buzz, the singing of birds.

"From now on we’re on our own," Alan says. "We can go hiking, go to the pond..." He pulls back as if he’s said something nasty, then he resumes. "I’ll cook us a romantic dinner with wine and candles." He brightens again. "And then if we’re especially lucky we’ll get a chance to watch the Perseids."

Stars have always been an enthusiasm of his and, feeling guilty about remembering that earlier transgression she vowed to put behind her, Joelle wants to respond more warmly, but she realizes how tired she’s become. She wouldn’t think of telling Alan, though: he’d be at her side in a minute with a pillow. Ever since she came back from the hospital it’s been too easy for them to fall into those roles. "Mm," she says, "I don’t know about the Perseids but that romantic dinner sounds great. Too bad we can’t get started on that right now."

"You have the appetite of a wolf, my dear." Alan shakes his head. "But we have to act with some restraint." He touches her briefly, as if he can’t contain the impulse, then goes to the Dutch door and looks at the sky. "It would be a shame if it turned out to be too hazy to see those stars tonight." Already she hears the anticipation of disappointment.

This is hard for him, she knows. She utters a silent prayer that the sky will be clear enough tonight for him to see his Perseids. With everything that’s happened, who’d deny him a handful of stars? It would be appropriate, too, in this fairy tale house built by Ray’s father as a refuge from the world. Though of course that didn’t prevent him from sitting in his car one cold winter evening in Westchester, the radio playing songs from the 40’s while the garage filled with carbon monoxide--to this day his son can’t listen to a note of the music of that era. Once again Joelle is brought up short by the way her thoughts seem to circle back to the wrong kind of story.

Alan is still looking out the Dutch door, leaning on his arms. "I plan to read and laze around until that dinner," Joelle says. "What about you?"

"I’m going to cut down a tree or two. Ray says they’re blocking out the sky and I’m welcome to chop down as many as I want."

"Oh, then do it by all means. We must have sky, for heaven’s sake. Give us some sky, Paul Bunyan."

He smiles broadly. "On a silver platter."

Joelle is suddenly blindsided by a white fury, she’s had enough of Alan’s elaborate deference: if he’s looking for absolution for all his sins she can’t provide it. And after all, what’s happened to her wasn’t his fault. It’s not fair to be angry at him for that, she knows. But then, what’s fair? She doesn’t know who or what she’s angry at. She looks at Alan. Why can’t she just feel happy with this harmless nonsense of his? Why does she have to feel he’s always going a little too far? Why is she so sure that deep in the solicitous blue of his eyes she can detect an icy terror?

"Just think," he says, "if we were back home we’d have to watch Jack and Carol’s videos of their trip to China. Do you suppose we’re the only people in the world who haven’t been to China?"

She smiles appreciatively but she says nothing for a few seconds, just lets herself breathe in the smells of the place. In minutes she’ll have it all to herself. "You’re right," she says. "‘The McSherrys enter the Forbidden City.’" She gives him a smile. "That romantic dinner had better be good."

"Only after I work up a sweat." Alan looks around. "One more thing: we have to get this old clock going."

"Wait," she says. "Go ahead and crank it: I like the sound. But don’t set it to the right time."

He looks at her a moment. Then he nods. "Sweetheart, with you it’s always the right time."

She’s relieved when he’s gone. She tells herself it’s because the exercise will do him good. Really, though, there are times when she just wishes they’d all go away, all the friends and well-wishers. Their words, their concern, fill the air like flies. But, alone, she can’t avoid the shadow, the heaviness in her psyche, she can’t ever completely shake off the sense that bad things happen because of some failing, something you didn’t do. When her mother was dying a couple of years ago Joelle took on extra work at the office. Everybody sympathized with her for how much she had to do, they praised her dedication, and it was true that she wore herself down until she was practically a walking ghost. Only she knew she was trying to avoid those awful hours in the hospital. It was all too clear how her mother’s story was going to end and she never doubted she could bear it when it came, it was the terrible chapters in between she wanted to avoid. In the end, though, maybe life is nothing more than the chapters in between. The old clock ticks, its ignorant beats measuring the sinking of her anger, her dread, sinking toward the emptiness that lies beneath all of them.

But she’s restless in her solitude. Though she’s brought some books of her own she steps onto the parquet floor of the tiny library and randomly pulls out from the shelves a musty old tale about the building of a cathedral. While she skims the story, reading as much for the smell of the old paper as for the words, she hears Alan’s hatchet blows in the forest. She closes her eyes, wanting to surrender to the moment. The last time they were here, almost five years ago, Alan was cutting trees while she lazed about, sunbathing in the nude. "My, my, what have we here," he said, covered with sweat, axe on his shoulder, when he saw her. She probably gave him some smart answer like, "You sure you’re big enough to handle that axe, mister?" How confident and stupid she’d been then. That was before Louise, before everything. She shudders at the memory, holding the book before her like a shield. Meanwhile the axe strokes ring out deep in the fairy tale forest. A faint trace of mildew is detectable in the library, subtly changing the smell that rises up from the old house and the tiny room’s walls close in on her. For long seconds the woods are chillingly silent, then the axe strokes resume, distant, furious, mysterious, her husband wreaking his rage upon the universe.

Joelle returns to her book. "A cathedral is not built in a moment," she reads, "and sometimes even an age may not provide time enough to finish the enormous work it entails. As Frere Luc gazed at the skeleton rising above the windy plains, he wondered if he would live to see the building completed, the nave crowded with ardent worshipers, music filling the holy spaces and incense rising to the loftiest reaches of the majestic structure." She smiles, sympathizing with Frere Luc. May your wish be granted, she thinks, venturing further into the book’s stately prose. She takes the book with her to the wing chair and settles in for a satisfying read, grateful for the lucky find.

By dinnertime Joelle is feeling better. Maybe even despair gets tiring after a while. What she has to do is to make the most of this special time for the two of them and Alan is really being quite wonderful. The physical exercise has taken the edge off of his nursely air and he’s more natural now. The wine helps too: Joelle swirls it in the fat glass so that it catches the gauzy light. In the cramped kitchen Alan is chopping garlic, its smell fills the room. He’s making chicken fillets with his own special sauce and a salad. Dark wet spinach glistens in a yellow bowl. Life is sweet, she tells herself, sweet and precious. Alan has been so good the last few weeks. "Honey," she calls to the kitchen.

"What?"

"I’m stupid, you know that?"

He hesitates a moment--she doesn’t know whether it’s delicacy or a sense of comic timing. "O.K.," he says. "You’re stupid."

"I’m stupid because I’ve got a great guy like you and I mope." The wine has given her a pleasant sense of distance. Time beats like a sleeper’s heart in all the rooms of the little house.

"You don’t mope," he says. "You sulk."

She shakes her head even though he can’t see her. "I wouldn’t call it sulking. Brooding maybe," she offers, "or pouting."

"Yes," he says, "you’re right: you pout but you pout so charmingly. I’ve always loved that about you. Really, I was starting to worry that your pouting had fallen off, I thought you’d lost it, you know, and started moping."

In the silence that follows all the smells in the house intensify, the colors take on richer tones, Joelle is alert, in a moment she’ll be able to detect the sounds of the mice in the eaves, spiders weaving their webs, bees whining in the grape arbor. She laughs quietly. "God, it’s all so crazy, you know? So God-damned unfathomably and mysteriously crazy."

He’s come into the doorway, wine glass in hand. The sunlight turns his blue sleeve celestial and he looks at her a long time without saying anything. Then he breaks into a slow smile. "You’re right," he says. "And I just may be the lunatic you’re looking for." He approaches the table. "May I pour you more wine?"

"Yes," she says. "Yes, yes." She wishes she could absolve him, forgive him, herself, everyone. She smells the spices that surround him like an olfactory halo, hears the obtusely confident ticking of the clock whose hands mark somebody else’s time. With all this, the food will be almost anticlimactic.

After dinner they drive through the hazy sunlight coming off of the river. The car twists along the winding asphalt, sounds and smells changing constantly. When they round a bend the air is wet and fishy, a moment later they’re immersed in the smell of leaves. Just before they reach the little town there’s a surprising cleft in the wooded rocks where a hissing string of white water falls with a cool, shimmering freshness.

"Oh, God," Joelle says, "I wish this ride would never end."

Alan leans toward the dash as if to check the fuel gauge. "Got enough gas for that." Then their tires thrum on the wooden surface of the covered bridge, light and sound transformed in the long enclosed box with its little cut-outs of window, vivid squares of silver, brown and green. The hour is quiet, there are few people in town. Across a little bridge, perched steeply on the rising rock, is a tall, spindly old house that looks like the one from Psycho, disheveled, unpainted. It’s for sale and someone has pulled the trees away so prospective buyers can get a better view. Joelle remembers the place; she liked it better when it was hidden by leaves and scrub, vaguely sinister. She turns from the house to the sheets of water moving across the rocky bed of the stream. You have everything before you, Doctor Weiser told her. You’re young, you have so much. Just now she wants to believe him.

"Is that roadhouse still here?" she asks.

"Only one way to find out."

It isn’t really a roadhouse though Joelle likes to think of it that way but it’s a pleasant enough bar where they have some beers and listen to music on the juke box, watch the locals carry on their little romances as the light outside is gathered up by the thick-leaved trees. They play some pool, badly, but they have fun. Joelle wishes dancing were allowed, she wants to move to the music. This is a good sign, she thinks: her torn body has a will of its own, there’s no self-consciousness to the thought of dancing. Of course the wine and beer have a lot to do with it but she remembers someone telling her that there are times when we’re wisest in our folly. It was Jack, her art teacher in college. They almost had an affair. What if it had happened, she wonders, would everything else have changed, would she be in this bar now, after all the other things? How would Jack have reacted to what happened to her? She wonders where he is now. He’d be, what? almost sixty. She can’t remember which of them had backed off, why they didn’t move across that final tiny space though they’d come very close one fall day when he gave her a ride home. He was wearing his green duffel coat with wooden toggles. The air was damp, wet leaves stuck to the streets, she smelled the wool of his coat, scotch on his breath. Dear Jack, dear dear Jack whom she hasn’t seen now in, oh, how long is it? He could even be dead, it occurs to her. A chill makes her blood heavy with a sense of inconsolable loss. She turns the glass between her fingers. The music thumps, billiard balls crash loudly, scattering at the break. It will pass.

After a moment she turns toward Alan and touches his hand. "I’d like to go back now, sweetie." He nods, looks at her, but he doesn’t move. She runs her fingers through the valleys of his knuckle. The music and the voices of the patrons have become very loud in the last few seconds. She feels his hand turn under hers to gently capture her fingers with his blistered palm. "My crucified saint." She touches a raw place where the top layer of skin has been torn off by the repeated abrasions of the axe-handle. It’s red and tender, unprotected. "You should have worn gloves." She feels the soft, exposed flesh. "Does it hurt?" He looks at her saying nothing, his eyes are empty. The crowd at the bar suddenly roars.

Joelle and Alan drive back, hills and river hidden in the blackness. Only scraps of the twisting road are visible in the beam of their headlights. Even where the dark trees give way, the sky is opaque. Joelle is hunched into herself, her mind a blank. Then it occurs to her that Alan’s not going to see his stars fall. Poor dear, poor dear. She thinks of his blistered hands holding the steering wheel. She touches his shoulder sympathetically and all at once she’s trembling.

Once again the car bounces up the steep road until the gleam of light from the little house shows through the trees. In moments they’re there: the night air is filled with the smell of grass, cicadas are shrieking. Hurriedly Joelle and Alan leave the car and seem to be inside without having traversed the dark space. Already they’re upstairs and on the bed. They pull at each other hungrily and soon their clothes are off. It’s dark and there’s no awkward transition as there has been since she’s come back from the hospital, no disappearance and reemergence, no careful approach on Alan’s part. His mouth explores her body, along her stomach to her breast. She’s there and not there at the same time but all at once she comes alert, sensing that something is different this time. She tightens, her hand on his head, ready to prevent his further movement but not resisting when she feels him push, like a predator, to the place where the other breast was. Her hand over his head is like a frozen star as hungrily, hopelessly, desperately, he moves his tongue over the scar and Joelle holds her breath at first, then lets herself go. What is it he wants? What is it that separates them? Is it death he’s trying to taste, running his tongue over the gouge on her body, is it life? It excites her, she’s crying softly, whether with delight or sorrow she doesn’t know. She clutches a handful of his hair and pulls him to herself as if she’s trying to suffocate him. All around them the woody smells of the room blend with the sweat of their bodies. Alan’s head moves under her hand like a child’s.

Later she’s standing with Frere Luc at the rear of the finished cathedral. A mass is being said and hushed worshipers move along the columned aisles, far away a priest is climbing the steps of the altar, somewhere in these vast, dark spaces an organ is playing. Joelle’s heart is full, she’s happy for Frere Luc. It’s done, she wants to tell him, and it’s more wonderful than you could have imagined, but when she turns to him he’s not there. She whispers his name yet even as she runs her fingers across the cool stone of a column she isn’t sure he was ever in the building. She awakens in a darkness she can’t identify until it comes to her: Ray’s summer place; and she reaches for Alan beside her. When she can’t find him she’s suddenly frightened, she calls his name. "I’m here," he answers and she sees that he’s gone out onto the balcony. "The sky’s cleared up," he tells her. "You wouldn’t believe all the stars." There’s a shiver in his voice. "And they’re falling every couple of seconds. You ought to come out here and see. This is amazing."

"I think I’ll stay here," she says. "You can just tell me when you see them fall." She’s remembering his hungry mouth at the empty place. Now she can make out his silhouette distinctly: a naked man in the doorway, looking away, his head raised towards the stars. "You watch," she says, still getting used to knowing where she is.