Cool's Ridge Read online

  Once out of the white wooden village, I drove on feeling amazed. The countryside here was rougher, steeper, less benign entirely, with rocky tree-covered hills and far off in the distance, the scalloped profiles of various blue mountain ranges. It reminded me of “the North Country,” that part of New York State my mother’s family comes from, only here the trees were different, hardwood, cedar, hemlock, not the pine and spruce and fir of the near Adirondacks.

  I had gone up to the Adirondacks once or twice to see what it looked like. Mostly, it was poor, but on certain humid summer days the air is so astringent the pine scent sears your lungs. My other grandparents—my father’s people, the Stillwells—had had a summer place at Pleasant Point, Maine. When we were kids, Johnny and I would be shipped up to Maine every summer for a couple of weeks. My father would come up to get us and stay a day. We would spend the time sailing Muscongus Bay with my father and grandfather, and they would drink beer and argue without interruption. My memory of these sailing expeditions always does a fast-forward to the day’s end, coming up off the mooring, the dinghy bobbing, my father carrying the sail bags, my grandfather carrying the cooler, John carrying sweaters and towels and me carrying the old-fashioned picnic hamper, with its neat elastic bands stapled into the wood cover to hold plastic knives and forks. We would all be sunburned and cranky and thirsty and no one spoke and John and I would feel embarrassed and glad after all to be going home.

  I came to the old farmhouse with the roof bashed in and made the left turn onto the dirt road. You had to drive slowly to navigate past the outcropping rocks and potholes and even so, you raised a cloud of dust. The road went on and on. They were certainly way back in there. I had said to him on the telephone, “Well, shall I come or not?”

  “If you want,” he said. He seemed amused by my asking.

  “Tell me what you want,” I said.

  He countered. “What is it you want?”

  What was the point, I had thought, of lying? So I told him the truth. “I want to see you,” I said.

  He laughed. “Well then come,” he said.

  “How do I get there?” I asked.

  “One, get a map. Two, find Dix Mills. Three, at the village ask directions to Cool’s Ridge Farm.”

  “That simple?”

  “Sure,” he said. “No use making things more complicated than they are.”

  “Can I stay up there?”

  “Why not?” he said.

  “I mean, is there room? I don’t know the set-up.”

  “Well,” he said, “there isn’t any.”

  But you see, that was his way of dealing with life, pretending not to see the set-up, the way things were arranged. It was part of his charm. He would steer past or through structures as if they didn’t exist. It was a simple and generally successful approach to life, a way of getting to the heart of things, or maybe bypassing the heart of things. He was a year older than me. I’d met him my senior year in college and we’d been lovers off and on for four years. It seemed a long time to me. I wanted to see him now because I needed to know some things about us—where were we going? What were we? It was clear to me how I felt, but I had no idea how he felt and I had tracked him to the Farm mostly to find this out.

  I drove slowly on. The dense gloom of forest primeval gave way to scattered light and then a growing widening whiteness as if a tunnel had silently exploded. I heard shouts and water splashing. Off to the left, I saw a wide, gracefully leaning willow, and under its pendant green boughs, a glinting pond with swimmers. Light glanced off a lifted arm, a spume of silver water shot upward, there was a gabble of noise and a shriek. Beyond the pond, a brown barn-like structure rose up from a stone foundation. Beyond that was a tall, tree-covered ridge, as steep as a wall.

  I followed the dirt road around the “barn” into a grassy lot and parked next to a Volkswagen beetle colored a pumpkin orange. Well. Here I was. I needed a drink of water, I needed to pee, I’d been driving for hours. I felt stuck to the seat of the car, and sitting there tired and stiff, with a faint headache and a mouth full of glue, I squinted ahead into a post and chicken-wire fence, trying to focus. Inside the fence, someone was hunched among the leafy plants of a vegetable garden. I got out of the car and walked over. Looking down, I saw a head of hair, the kind of pure, impossibly blond hair they manufacture in Iceland or northern Sweden. The head moved—she had bent to pull rhubarb, and her face tilted up, and her mouth wrenched in what I felt was not surprise so much as dislike. But why? Did she know who I was?

  She stood up. She, too, had on jeans cut off at the thigh, and a white cotton halter and sneakers. Her legs were pretty, but not as long as mine. Her eyes were a bright blue, the color they call cornflower. She was lightly tanned and she wore large gold hoop earrings. A delicate gold chain lay upon her neck and a small cross hung from it, between her breasts. She was really quite pretty, you might say beautiful. There was even the requisite imperfection, a deep scar-like frown-line between the bright blue eyes. I felt my heart contract in a spasm of jealousy.

  “Are you looking for someone?” she asked me. Her tone was cold. Who did she think I was? Or did she know who I was?

  I said, “Yes, I am,” and then impulsively asked, “What’s your name?”

  She said, flatly, “Alice,” and then repeated her question. “Are you looking for someone?”

  Even before I said his name I knew how her face would change.

  3.

  They called the community “the Farm” because for almost two hundred years a family named Cool had owned and farmed the hundred and fifty acres. Indeed, the Cools had made out of the property two farms. At the very top of the ridge, on its wide, grassy, wind-swept crest was the “new” farm, a farmhouse, barn and outbuildings erected in the 1850’s. The lower acreage, with its pond and marsh and pastures now grown into woods, was “the old place,” and we lived in what had been the original barn, a “bank barn” whose north foundation wall lay up against the hillside and one of whose massive walnut beams bore the carved out legend “Cool—1780.” The “old” farmhouse had burned to the ground before World War I.

  Because our barn was “banked,” it had entrances on different levels. A door in the stone foundation led to the old “dairy,” a whitewashed space that smelled still of hay and that we used mainly for storage. Outside the dairy door, a wooden staircase led up to the sliding glass doors of the dining porch, although our “front door,” on this same floor but on the building’s north side, was at ground level. This entrance faced the wooded ridge. A small porch protected the doorway, and flagstones made the space into a shady terrace. Late in the hot afternoons, I used to drag a wicker rocker out there, put my feet up on a milk can, and read until the mosquitoes came. The pond side had gnats and flies, the ridge side mosquitoes.

  Hanging near this entrance in the dim seldom-used front hall was a photograph in a black frame taken of the “old” farmhouse at the turn of the century: you saw a handsome house of white clapboard with black shutters and a long porch. In the picture, a woman stood leaning tensely over the porch railing, her hands gripping rather than resting upon it. She wore a dark full skirt and a high-collared white blouse and she stared stonily out at the picture-taker. You had to look hard to see that a child was half-hidden in the dark shadows of the skirt’s folds.

  Whenever I looked at this photograph, I felt an acute alarm, as if something terrible were about to happen. The woman’s stony face, rigid arms and pitched stance seemed completely detached from the blurred little mite clinging to her skirts.

  In 1919, Dr. Emil Gerstner of Brooklyn, New York, bought the entire Cool acreage for two thousand dollars. He remodeled the barn and made of it what the locals long referred to as “the funny farm,” or as Dr. Gerstner advertised in the November 1919 issue of Vanity Fair: “a convalescent home for tuberculars, inebriates, or those with certain disabling nervous afflictions, located in the salubrious mountain clime of northwestern New Jersey yet in easy access of New York City by w
ay of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railway.” This advertisement, also framed in black, hung in the front hall opposite the eerie photograph of the woman, child and vanished farmhouse.

  The advertisement adequately explained the strict and boxlike arrangement of the third floor bedrooms. Each bedroom had, still, its ascetic bed with square head and footboards of white-painted iron bars; its washstand with pitcher and bowl; one spindly cane-bottom rocking chair; a small oak dresser with attached oak-framed mirror (this mirror had odd projections like a stag’s antlers protruding out of the top corners, handy for hanging up scarves, jewelry, hats, bras). There were no closets. One imagines that convalescence in 1919 was a serious, spartan affair, with cold showers, blasts of frigid outdoor air, hearty meals, and no fripperies. Instead of a closet my own room had a row of wooden hooks on the wall near the door. The walls were thin. Nighttimes, in 1919, the rooms must have echoed with the wretched coughing of the tuberculars, while now you only heard snoring or crying or an insomniac’s radio. Privacy was provided by the sensitivity of our community’s citizens.

  Which, it appeared, was a lot. I didn’t know what to expect of the Farm at first. I suppose by temperament I’m more of an observer and skeptic than a doer or believer. I never latch onto the latest craze, and I wasn’t really impressed by the love-child, flower-child, commune stuff espoused by so many of my college contemporaries. I’d had a number of friends, both women and men, who’d gone into group living situations. The sex was the easy part, the emotional aftermaths difficult. I was suspicious, and a little worried, that this group might have similar proclivities, when what I really wanted was to stake my claim—I wanted Skip and I didn’t want to share. I wanted him for myself.

  Later, it seemed to me that the most onerous burden of the Farm’s living arrangements was not the physical closeness but the psychic closeness, the way after a couple of months we all bonded with each other and felt for each other. There was always so much going on, so much to discuss, analyze, consider, and we were as a generation all so imbued with the various residues of post-Freudian living, that in a way it was like continuous group therapy, and it was both fascinating and exhausting, in the way those things can be. It does seem to me that, given my temperament, I spent quite a lot of time looking (maybe unconsciously) for a place to hide—the flagstone terrace, my room, the “dairy” (great in summer with its cool whitewashed stone walls), which is ironic, given the fact that the community was founded mainly to give all of us asylum.

  Most of the time, when you wanted to talk to somebody, you hung out on the main floor. It had two parlors—a winter parlor with a stone fireplace and a summer parlor full of scratchy wicker. Both rooms opened onto the long porch that overlooked the pond. (I pictured Dr. Gerstner’s tuberculars and dypsomaniacs reclining there on wooden deck chairs, wrapped in fringed “rugs” and reading, reading, reading old-fashioned novels.) So for three seasons, life in the community was circular and flowed from the summer parlor to the kitchen to the porch, and through the French doors back into the parlor again, and I suppose that this circularity, this constant flow of talk and energy, was what the community came to represent to me.

  When it was warm, the old-fashioned French doors that led to the porch were always open, but one afternoon in July we had an intense rainstorm. While the wind was howling and sweeping across the pond, and while branches swayed and came crashing, and the rain lashed the windows, and everyone rushed around to close the doors against the elements, I saw a large white heron come beating off the pond, struggling against the force of the wind, its wings frantically flapping, its long skinny rudder-legs trailing and looking too frail for its cumbersome feathered body. We thought it was going to crash against the house, but at the critical moment it sharply jerked up its awkward beaked head and cleared our roof, and we all cheered, relieved.

  Skip and I took advantage of the natural disturbances to get a little privacy upstairs. Later I felt so content as we lay there, naked and clamped together on his white bed. His hand rested on my hipbone, our feet were loosely entwined, my head rested on his left arm. I could smell the warm and yeasty smell of his armpit, I rested my lips on the vulnerable whiteness of his arm’s underside. His limp penis lay comfortably at rest against my buttocks. We lay there, looking out at the streaming window with its dingy lace curtains and crooked yellow shade, and we watched the shade pull, a crocheted circle on a string, idly sway from the force of the gale beating upon the window.

  Inhaling the odors of that room (which now seem indelibly printed on my synapses)—the smell of cedar, dampness, dust, Skip’s yeasty warmth—I said impulsively, “Let’s get married and live here forever.” I felt all of him—except his penis—stiffen.

  And then he laughed and reached out and picked up my hand. He put it to his lips and kissed it and then drowsily sucked the knuckle of my thumb. (Next door, Wayne’s radio came on with a staticky crackle, but you heard or imagined a chorus of rusty bedsprings and May’s throaty giggle.)

  Skip let my hand drop. He rubbed his bristly chin back and forth on my shoulder blade. “Tell you what,” he said, “let’s sleep on it.” And then he turned his back to me and as sweetly as a child, tucked his hands under his pillow and went to sleep.

  But that first afternoon when I arrived, he wasn’t there, and he came in late for dinner. They had just bought the newspaper then, the Sussex Monitor, and he had gone to talk to the printers about money. It appeared that Skip was to be “the publisher,” and he had wanted to get some idea of printing costs.

  My second night at the Ridge, he came in late, too. It was a clear warm evening, twilight, and they’d seated me facing out so that I could see the gold and aqua sunset on the pond. It was Alice’s night to cook and her cooking was very good. Half of the members of the group were vegetarians and the others ate very simple kinds of meat—broiled chicken or hamburgers. On this night, Alice had cooked a ratatouille out of the first small squash and zucchini from the garden. There were broiled chicken legs, she had baked whole-wheat bread. Seven of us sat at the long trestle table on the dining porch and perhaps because of the beauty of the evening the talk was desultory and quiet. Alice and I talked about the garden—I knew nothing about gardening, I thought vegetarians were mostly crackpots. She talked rapidly, somewhat angrily about chemicals—insecticides and fertilizers—and I listened and nodded but I felt uneasy because she never looked at me, she talked past me, out of the screened windows. I felt vaguely worried. What was she angry about? Was she angry at me? My arriving? What was the situation here, anyway?

  When Skip came in he stood in the doorway grinning, but in response, I felt a pain, as if inside me, in the region of my heart, a little caged bird was beating its wings. He always had the effect on me of making me feel ashamed of my feelings, so, like an adolescent I scowled and ducked my head. He seemed to me so beautiful. He was a little under six feet tall, well built, with shoulder-length ringlets of a reddish brown and freckles. His wide mouth with the rather thick lips, seemed a little chapped. There was a light in his hazel eyes and in his expression.

  He did not kiss me, nor did he speak. Coming around behind me he lifted a hank of hair off the back of my neck, tugged at it, let it drop.

  “No sex at dinner. What did Cummings say?” The very tall man named Leonard made these two crisp and incongruous remarks. This was the first time since I’d arrived that I’d clearly heard him say anything, but it was obvious that when he talked, you had to listen. The voice was so deep it commanded attention, like the rumble of an organ. Also, he’d lifted his head, which more usually hung upon his chest. He had a jutting nose, dark gray-blue eyes, and springy black hair parted on the side, cut surprisingly short. In that era of long male hair it was unusual, iconoclastic, really, for someone who was against the war to wear a short haircut. Even when I was in college, short haircuts were called “army” and were worn by men in the ROTC.

  “No business at dinner,” Alice said from the doorway. She had a blue scarf t
ied over her hair, and she stood with her hands on her hips, a wooden cooking spoon in one hand.

  “Paper prices went up twice this year,” Skip said, reaching for the bread tray. “We’re going to have to do a lot of canvassing for advertisers.”

  “You guys! No business at dinner. I’ve been cooking for hours so shut up and enjoy it.”

  “Yes Ma’am,” Skip said meekly and winked at me.

  It seemed all right, it really did. Although we’d agreed to see other people when we were alone and far apart (which was most of the time), I didn’t think Skip would have encouraged me to come if he had something on. I didn’t think he was that indifferent, or careless or cruel.

  “So,” Skip said, looking up from his plate and raising his auburn brows, “what’d you do today? Did you talk to everybody?”

  “Everybody but you,” I said. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Mister Nobody,” Skip said. He turned to Sal, who sat on his left, a guy whose black curly-lashed blue eyes and stub of a nose seemed lost in a mass of tumbling black hair, eyebrows, beard.

  “I was always somebody,” Sal said. He’d grown up in Plainfield, New Jersey, and I never did figure out what he was doing with this group. His uncle, he said, had organized New Jersey Italians for Nixon. Sal was tough and funny and could cut the bullshit level with one crack, and he knew almost everything there was to know about carpentry and horses. He did construction work in the good weather and shod horses when it rained or snowed.