In the weeks and months after the police car came down the long driveway with her dog lashed to the roof, a new and terrible thought came to her. Maybe how things were now was not simply a temporary state she’d pass through on the way to her real life. Maybe this was her real life—sitting by the fire listening to sad songs with a bowl of popcorn for dinner, drawing pictures of a made-up child. Darla and Kimmie came by now and then, and Walt, but days went by sometimes in which she spoke to nobody. Before, she could have counted on the sound of Charlie breathing at her feet. Now, except for times she played music, the one sound she heard was that of her own pencils on the paper. The house was that quiet.
11.
A Red-Headed Man
Normally, Eleanor worked all day, writing and illustrating her Bodie stories. Seven days a week she put in her hours, not winding down until around four thirty, when she’d take her walk to the waterfall and, in warm weather, swim.
But she’d seen a poster for a craft fair that weekend, a few towns north, and decided to give herself a break.
It was a gorgeous day. Late April, the leaves on the ash tree out front just starting to unfurl themselves, the first crocus breaking through the soil where a few last patches of snow had not yet melted. In the car on the way to the fair, she put on a Doc Watson tape. “If I Needed You” started playing—a Townes Van Zandt song she loved. She sang along with the tape. I’d swim the seas for to ease your pain.
The fair was housed in the parking lot outside the Masonic lodge of the town, though most of the craftspeople displaying their work were hippies rather than Masons. If a person wanted a very solid ceramic casserole or a mandala, or a mug that probably wouldn’t break if you threw it on a concrete floor, this was the place to find it. Also macramé plant hangers and hand-stenciled wrapping paper and hooked rugs and homemade soap and braided rugs and patchwork quilts. Breadboards in the shape of the state of New Hampshire.
She had spotted him the minute she walked into the hall. Hard to miss a six-foot-three-inch red-headed man, curls circling his face like a halo, with a goat tied to his display table. A simple hand-lettered banner was stretched across the front: “Cameron. Maker of Beautiful Things.” A small cluster of people had gathered—ostensibly to sample the cheese he’d set out, though Eleanor guessed they had been drawn to the red-headed man’s table for the same reason she was. The man.
He was talking about the products he made, apparently, and a group had assembled to listen to him. Women, not surprisingly. He may have been the most handsome person Eleanor had ever laid eyes on, but there was more to it than that. Anyone could see this person had an air of assurance about him, with his checkered shirt and his red bandanna and his one pierced ear and his leather boots that looked as if they’d been made by some wonderful old Italian shoemaker, though it was also possible he’d made them himself. He was the kind of person other people probably tried to imitate, but they weren’t likely to succeed. Wherever it was he was going, you’d want to come.
In addition to cheese, the red-headed man made hand-turned bowls from tree burls. Some of these were so small all they could hold was a handful of nuts, though there was one burl bowl on display so large it could have held salad for twenty people.
Eleanor visited all the other craft tables before making her way to the red-headed man’s display.
She cupped the smallest bowl in her hands, stroking the wood. The goat was chewing on her skirt, but Eleanor kept her gaze on the inside of the bowl. If she looked directly into his eyes, she knew it would be all over.
He spoke his name to her. “I thought you’d never stop at my table,” he said.
He extended his hand. Not as rough as you’d think, for a man who worked in wood. Later she would learn that he rubbed oil on his palms and fingertips every night, to soften them.
“You know what I really want to do with this bowl,” she said. “I want to put it up to my face so I can feel it against my cheek.” After she said this, she wondered what came over her. She didn’t usually talk this way, particularly to a person she’d just met. Particularly a man.
“What’s stopping you?” he said. “I have a policy that if I feel like doing something, unless it’s going to hurt someone, I do it.”
Years later Eleanor could still remember how he looked that first night, when he brought her back to the little cabin he’d built, a few miles outside of Brattleboro.
They brought the goat out to the shed first. He’d made a sign on her pen, out of a burl, with her name carved into it. Opal. “I wanted to name her Alison,” he said. “But I decided to save that one for when I have a daughter.”
Even that first night he spoke of children. She told him about the death of her dog, which seemed at the time to loom larger than the death of her parents.
“Charlie was like my best friend,” she told Cam. “Not like my best friend. He was.”
Back in the house—the air chilly now, though it was April—Cam lit the stove. He took off his shirt in the firelight—his skin freckled and glistening, his face so finely chiseled it was as if she could see the skull beneath his skin. His body was as keenly defined as a figure in the old anatomy book she kept on her desk back home—every rib visible.
“I’d like to draw you,” she said. She surprised her own self with her boldness. She was not a person who could talk about sex, or his body, or her own. But from the moment they’d met she had felt strangely at ease, safe even, in his presence. “I never go anyplace without my drawing pencils.”
“Draw me? Nobody ever did that before,” he said. “Cool.”
He stepped out of the rest of his clothes with as little self-consciousness as if he were peeling a piece of fruit, and for the next hour she sat there making a portrait of him on the back of a piece of newsprint laid flat on his kitchen table.
He knew how to keep perfectly still. He didn’t try to talk, and neither did Eleanor. She was perfectly concentrated on the act of studying his body and re-creating it on the page. His gaze remained fixed on her.
It was two hours later when she set down the pencil. Still naked, he walked over to the table and studied the image she’d made of him on the page.
“You got me,” he told her. “Not a lot of people do.”
Up until this, Eleanor had felt a surprising absence of self-consciousness, probably on account of focusing as she did on her drawing, but now she felt the warmth in her face and, more so, deep in her body.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m starving,” he said.
He pulled on his pants and cooked for her on the tiny gas stove in his one-room cabin overlooking the river—table, chair, apple crate with a few pairs of long underwear and jeans, a couple of T-shirts folded on top, a futon. The dish he made featured olives and sun-dried tomatoes, eggs, goat cheese courtesy of Opal, some herb Eleanor should have recognized but didn’t, cumin maybe. Before he set the meal on the floor—the floor, not the table, because he had only one chair—he had laid out an Indian bedspread and a couple of pillows. He lit candles—not one, but five or six—and put on a recording of some Celtic singer. Partway through the meal, he had leaned in and studied her face. “You have sauce on your chin,” he said, and licked it off.