Subtle Bodies Read Free Page A

to be called an estate. It did, after all, have a whole variety of buildings on the property, including a stone tower. And this had to be the bridge that some of the taxi services in the area would go no farther than when delivering visitors to Douglas’s. He had been given this piece of information by the Trailways driver when he dropped Ned on the highway between his scheduled stops. The driver had also mentioned the tower, and, overall, that the locals didn’t like Douglas, or hadn’t liked him.
    Ned started across the bridge and then stopped. It came to him strongly that he needed a better idea of how he looked before he arrived, and there was no sign of a mirror in the roadway. His eyes itched.
Visine
, he needed. There was none in his toiletries. In fact, his toiletries amounted to a toothbrush and deodorant picked up in an airport shop.
    Maybe he looked all right. He was wearing a new tan corduroy hacking jacket, a good blue dress shirt straight from the cleaners. Nina had found the jacket in a Junior League thrift shop she surveilled like a spy. He had all his hair, curly, graying, but still. Somebody in their group, he couldn’t remember who, had said it was a fact of life that people tended not to take people with curly hair seriously. But curly or not, he had his hair. He remembered that it was Douglas who had made the crack about curly hair. Myweight is okay, one seventy-two is good, he thought. The Timberland boots he was wearing gave his five ten and a half a little help. Elliot was the tallest in their group, six four and an ectomorph. The boots had been purchased by Nina and never worn. She had a mission to get everything together they would need when they went camping at Stinson Beach. They were going to be serious about camping. They had gone once. Stinson Beach was a good choice for starters because it wasn’t that far from Berkeley. So camping there could fit neatly into weekends and not protrude into their insane work life. They wouldn’t burn up hours getting to where they were going to rusticate.
    He kept calling Nina. At some point she was going to talk to him. And she would forgive him. Because she was forgiving. She would be getting deluged with calls for him, emails, faxes.
    He should have brought a novel, plucked something from Nina’s shelves of uppermiddleclassics. She called them that. Something by Louis Auchincloss or Barbara Pym or Frederick Buechner or Thornton Wilder, people he was not uninterested in reading. He felt guilty over not reading a piece of worthwhile fiction when the constraints of travel made it a completely justifiable waste of time, which was not what he meant. He should have brought along something with a story to it. Well, he hadn’t. And he hadn’t really tried to pay attention to the Ulster County countryside, either. Why Douglas had chosen to settle in this particular part of the forest was a question. The bus trip had been a montage interrupted by naps and daydreaming: sharp hills, thick forests crowding down close to the road, motels and restaurants and trailer parks, an inner-tubing center, a splat-ball drome, gun shops, a pottery studio with a huge stuccogolem in front holding a sign saying Feats of Clay. A lot of the businesses seemed to be shuttered. It was the end of September. Maybe everything was seasonal. And on the subject of not paying attention, he remembered a couple of years ago when they had been flying over the Rockies on a brilliant clear day and he had chided Nina for not paying attention to the grandeur below and she had said I find scenery beautiful but repetitive.
    He was at a halt, there at the bridge. His pant cuffs were drenched dark. He was forty-eight. Of the friends who would be there, Gruen was the youngest. Nina was thirty-seven. He would be meeting Douglas’s widow for the first time. She would be a wreck. Douglas’s son was fourteen, and Ned had met him briefly when he was a toddler. Elliot would be there, stooping down for