The Remedy for Love: A Novel Read online

  The

  REMEDY

  for LOVE

  A NOVEL BY

  BILL ROORBACH

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2014

  Also by BILL ROORBACH

  FICTION

  Life Among Giants

  The Smallest Color

  Big Bend

  NONFICTION

  Temple Stream

  A Place on Water

  (WITH ROBERT KIMBER AND WESLEY MCNAIR)

  Into Woods

  Summers with Juliet

  INSTRUCTION

  Writing Life Stories

  Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth

  For Poppy–

  Sixty Years of Unwavering

  Support

  Contents

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Part Two

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Part Three

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  About the Author

  About Algonquin Books

  Part One

  One

  THE YOUNG WOMAN ahead of him in line at the Hannaford Superstore was unusually fragrant, smelled like wood smoke and dirty clothes and cough drops or maybe Ben-Gay, eucalyptus anyway. She was all but mummified in an enormous coat leaking feathers, some kind of army-issue garment from another era, huge hood pulled over her head. Homeless, obviously, or as homeless as people were in this frosty part of the world—maybe living in an aunt’s garage or on her old roommate’s couch, common around Woodchuck (actually Woodchurch, though the nickname was used more often), population six thousand, more when the college was in session, just your average Maine town, rural and self-sufficient.

  Idly, Eric watched her unload her cart: he knew her situation too well. Sooner or later she’d be in trouble, either victim or perpetrator, and sooner or later he or one of seven other local lawyers would be called upon to defend her, or whomever had hurt her, a distasteful task in a world in which no social problem was addressed till it was a disaster, no compensation.

  Ten years before, new at the game, he might have had some sympathy, but he’d been burned repeatedly. Always the taste of that Corky Beaulieu kid he’d spoken for and sheltered and finally gotten off light and who’d emptied Eric’s bank account using a stolen check and considerable charm at the friendly local bank, and who’d then proceeded to drive Eric’s first and only brand-new car all the way to Florida before killing that college kid in a bar fight and immolating himself (and the car, of course, total destruction) in a high-speed chase with Orlando’s finest.

  Her shopping, pathetic: two large bags tortilla chips, a bag of carrots, a bag of oranges, four big cans baked beans—a good run—but then three boxes of Pop-Tarts and innumerable packets of ramen noodles, six boxes generic mac and cheese, two boxes of wine. The one agreeable thing after the produce was coffee, freshly ground, also a sheaf of unbleached coffee filters. Finally, a big bottle of Advil.

  Eric turned his attention to Jennifer Aniston on the cover of five different tabloids. Was she aging well? Had she gained a lot of weight? Was a minidress appropriate? Some people in this world got all the attention. Eric noted with odd pleasure that Ms. Aniston was older than he, if not by much.

  In a subdued voice, the young woman chose plastic over paper, and the kindly old bagger in his apron and bowtie packed her purchases carefully, well behind the checkout lady’s pace. But good for Hannaford, Eric thought, hiring the guy at no-doubt minimum wage with his savings all eaten up by his wife’s final illness—the sadness of late-life loss was in the old bird’s eyes and posture, even in his hands.

  The checkout lady was gruff and impatient, already turning to Eric’s stuff, which probably looked perverse compared with the girl’s, and had come from the new “gourmet” section of the market: organic jalapenos, organic Asian eggplants, organic red bell peppers, a bunch of organic kale for braising, two huge organic onions, a tiny bottle of fine Tuscan olive oil, five pounds good flour, French yeast in cakes, a huge chunk of very, very expensive raw-milk Parmesan (Reggiano, of course), two bottles Côtes du Rhône—and not just any old Côtes du Rhône but Alison’s favorite, thirty-four bucks a pop. Also a packet of Bic razors, the new, good ones with five blades and a silicone-lubricating strip, thick green handles. He was planning to cook for Alison—they’d always had fun making pizzas—and she liked her wine, also his chin, closely shaven, had once bitten him there in passion, but only once, and a long time ago. And fruit: he’d picked out the one ripe mango in the whole display in the event of an Alison morning, unlikely, also a dozen eggs.

  The druid girl ahead of him in line wasn’t saying it, but she didn’t have enough money. The old gent had packed everything and placed her six or seven bags of stuff into her cart. She counted out her fives and ones and piles of quarters again. “I thought I had it all added up,” she said humbly.

  “People are waiting,” the checkout lady said.

  “I’m fine,” Eric said brightly.

  The lady behind him made it plural, pleasant voice: “We’re fine.” Back after that, the line was nothing but patience.

  “I’ll have to put the coffee back,” the young woman said.

  The old gent knew right where the coffee was and dug it out along with the filters, and the checkout lady subtracted them from the register total, apparently a vexing task. Now the young woman’s bill was down to fifty-five dollars and change. She should have gone generic with the Advil, Eric thought. That would have saved her five bucks or more.

  “I’ll return ’em to stock,” the bagger said, meaning the coffee and the filters. He seemed sadder than ever, and Eric pictured the sweet old fellow using half his break to transport the items back to the correct shelf in some distant corner of the vast store.

  “It’s been ground,” the checkout lady said. “You’ll have to keep it.”

  “Then the oranges,” the young woman said. “And the carrots.”

  She didn’t know but Eric and everyone watching the little drama knew that the oranges and the carrots weren’t going to be enough. He found himself rooting against the Advil: keep the fruit, keep the carrots! That big bottle was probably eleven dollars.

  The checkout lady puffed a long breath. But the old gent in the apron said, “No, no, you need your nutrition. I’ll chip in here, honey.”

  “I couldn’t,” said the young woman.

  “Let’s just take the oranges out, Frank,” said the checkout lady, already tapping the buttons on her register.

  But Frank dug in his pockets. “Ach,” he said. He showed the gi
rl, he showed the checkout lady, he showed everyone in line: he only had a dollar and some odd change. Time stood still. Even the motes of dust stopped floating in the fluorescent box-store light. Eric felt something rumbling inside him, rumbling up all the way from his toes, something that gained momentum, something urging him to act, something physical, not articulate at all, something you would have to capitalize if you wrote it down on a yellow legal pad, something you could name a statue atop a fountain in the Vatican, not quite Grace. Charity, perhaps. His hands twitched, his mouth shaped words that wouldn’t come. Finally, just as the girl was going to say something about the Advil, he got it out:

  “I’ll get this. Frank, ma’am, young lady, let me get this.”

  But Frank had already put his buck fifty down.

  “No,” said the young woman. “No, please.”

  Eric added a crisp cash-machine twenty to her pile of wrinkled bills and simple as that, the checkout lady re-added the ticket, gave Eric the change for his twenty, gave Frank back his dollar fifty.

  The young woman regarded Eric briefly, coldly, more or less curtsied in that sleeping bag of a coat, flushed further. That was it for thanks. She ducked her head back into the depths of her hood and just pushed her cart out of there, noticeably limping, her very posture humiliated.

  “If these people would just learn to add,” the checkout lady said. One was supposed to know what “these people” meant.

  Eric’s purchases were already piled in front of old Frank. Eric paid the cashier, more than double the girl’s total, and for nothing but a single evening’s desperate hospitality. Frank, he noted, liked him, cheerfully putting Eric’s stuff in paper bags, two guys who cared about not only indigent young women but about the whole wide world. The checkout lady had no use for them at all, none of them.

  Two

  A HUGE SNOWSTORM was predicted, first big snow of the season, the inaugural flakes desultorily falling, some kind of unusual confluence of low-pressure and high-pressure and rogue systems, lots of blather on the radio as if a little snow were nuclear warfare or an asteroid bearing down. Eric liked his old Ford Explorer at times like this, even though (as Alison always said) it was a gas pig. He put his groceries in the back, if you could call them groceries, and swung out and across the glazed lot—last week’s ice storm—and there was the young woman, staggering and limping under that mountain of a coat but making determined progress, her seven plastic bags hanging from her arms like dead animals. Eric pulled up beside her but she didn’t stop walking, didn’t look.

  “I can give you a lift,” he called.

  “Okay,” she said to his surprise, still without looking. He’d expected her to demur in some proud way. He helped her load her stuff next to his in the back and then the two of them got all of his legal folders and books and naked cassette tapes and envelopes and other junk out of her way on the passenger seat, and she climbed in.

  “Seatbelt,” Eric said.

  She buckled up reluctantly.

  “Where are you?” Eric said as he pulled into traffic.

  She looked puzzled, peered around the edges of her hood, really caught his eye for the first time.

  “I mean, where to?”

  “Oh. Like, Route 138. Out toward Houk’s Corners. Just out of town the other way. Before the bridge. Maybe a mile before the bridge.”

  “That’s six miles easily. Maybe seven.”

  “I didn’t mean to buy so much. I’d already put a bunch of stuff back. I had another box of wine. I had oatmeal. Too heavy.”

  “You thought you were going to walk the whole way?”

  “I can’t believe you still have cassettes. I love cassettes. The way the tape is right there? You can touch the fucking music.” She looked at him quickly, then straight ahead, like someone driving, in fact watched the road minutely, sinking back into her coat. Her stench had begun to permeate the car. In profile, cut by the hood, her chin and nose and forehead lined up in a certain sculptural way. She wasn’t just anybody, Eric realized, and began to string together a tale of mental illness in a good family, runaway patient, perhaps, or just a college kid off her meds. He’d dealt with more than a few of those, too, on both sides of the family equation. He also knew how easy it was to be wrong about these things: best not to have theories.

  Gently he said, “I forgot my wallet once. I mean, it happens to everyone.”

  “I don’t even have a wallet,” she said quickly, and he realized his mistake: whatever had happened to her certainly did not happen to everyone.

  After that, they rode in silence. At the traffic light by the Park ’n’ Ride, Joan Killen was in the next lane, silent Prius. She didn’t look, but might have been interested if she had, her proper small-town attorney accompanied by some scruffy young woman in a darkly quilted hood.

  “Now where on 138 again?” Eric said.

  “Across from the veterinary?”

  “Oh, okay. Right. My dog goes there. Used to go there.”

  “You make it sound like a girl’s school.” Brief glance. Her voice was throaty, melodic despite her.

  He didn’t want her to stop talking. He said, “You go to the college?”

  “I go wherever I want.”

  “And where have you wanted to go?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “And yet you’re here.”

  “Actually I’m not.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m a ghost, if you want to know.” She slipped the hood back to see him better, tugged it off, whiff of mildew, faint trace of amusement leaving her face. Her hair looked like it had been chopped with a machete on one side, thinned with animal bites on the other, anyway it bunched heavily, with bald spots. Hair like that, you might want to wear a hood.

  Eric said, “What did you study?”

  “Study?”

  “At the college.”

  “Elementary ed and mathematics,” she said. There was an old cut on the top of her ear, might have been pretty bad, dried blood. “I’m good at mathematics. Also archeology, which was great, and English composition, which was okay.” A yellowing bruise on her neck. She said, “I got my teaching certificate, um, last spring. And then in the fall I had an actual, real job. Watch the fucking road.”

  The road was damp, nothing worse than that, and well paved, and empty, not that 138 was ever crowded, or even busy. Eric kept his eyes ahead, said, “You were graduated last spring?”

  “Last May.”

  “Nontraditional student?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well. You’re a little older than the usual, that’s all.”

  “They don’t get many ghosts.”

  “And you earned your teaching certificate.”

  “They gave it to me, anyway.”

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “The college. Who do you think?”

  At the sound of her tone, defensive, Eric said, “Of course. The college.” But he knew from a recent and painful false-credentials case that the state conferred certification, not the college. You had to apply for certification. It cost money. You had to provide fingerprints, full set, and that cost you, too: fifty-five bucks. He also knew when someone was lying. And English composition was a first-year course. Why would you mention that when you’d just been graduated?

  “I didn’t love teaching,” she said.

  He couldn’t help but return her sudden stare, unnerving, the remains of her bangs standing up as if in surprise. Still, face-on there was even more to her than he’d begun to think, intelligence, for one thing. And some kind of basic honesty. Her mouth was full with a dent in the top lip, off-center. Her nose was like a tired dog that had found a warm place to lie down and sleep. And she’d relaxed maybe a notch, kept his eye. She needed to wash her face, that’s all—she was sooty, plain dirty.

  “What grade?” Eric said at last. He’d done hundreds of these interviews. You look at the police report, meet with the client, keep it friendly, try to put two and two t
ogether, draw inferences, become a master of observation, figure out what’s true and what’s not, try, when there’s a choice, to take cases you can actually win. Not much choice lately.

  She let the tiniest smile arrive, cut it off short when she saw he noticed. “Maybe third,” she said. “Or maybe all of them.”

  “All of the grades, you mean?”

  She sought protection from his gaze, tweaked her own soft nose, clearly designed by the ghost shop to add some femininity to a rather hard face. “The principal adored me.”

  “What was his name?”

  “He hated me.”

  “Both?”

  “People are complicated.”

  He said, “Two sides to every coin.”

  So quick: “And two to most clichés.”

  “I’ll have to think about that.”

  “Watch the road.”

  They were getting close to the veterinarian’s. Eric found himself driving more slowly. He said, “What was the school called?”

  “Captain Arnold Elementary, named for Benedict Arnold, who not everyone knows made a heroic trek through Maine to attack the French at Montreal. We were happy at first.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Jimmy and me. He taught phys ed. I loved teaching third grade—third and fourth together, actually. Nine kids with two sets of twins. I miss them slightly.”

  “Slightly.”

  “One of the twin-parents complained. About, like, nothing. I didn’t explain the homework supposedly, which was like a math sheet with instructions, which I copied right off the curriculum they make you use. And Mr. Guest calls me in and there’s no support of any kind coming from him. So I call my advisor back at the college here and she just says, ‘Keep your head down, honey.’ And then the really nice parents . . .”

  “The ones you slightly miss.”

  “I don’t miss them at all. They come in for parents’ night and the other twins’ dad stands up—he’s like this rotund, bank-president, logger-swagger, king-of-the-garbage-men kind of guy with his wife pushing him—and he says the meek kids are bullying his kids. But, come on! The meek kids? They’re like these little fragile brainy wisps five years ahead of everyone else. And what Mr. Guest didn’t tell me is that these kids’ very nice parents had complained the year before about how their kids were being bullied. And so anyway the very nice dad bravely says, Nonsense. And the bank-president, logger-swagger dad says, And you, the teacher, just letting it happen? And I’m like, I wouldn’t ever! And Mr. Guest is like, Anyone else? And yes, like two other parents get up and repeat the whole thing, say that these meek little twins have been bullying their kids and as the teacher I’m letting it happen.”