The Clairvoyants(44)

“Where have you been?” I asked him.

“Get up,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

“Let me dress,” I said.

“No, just put on your coat and get your camera,” he said, as if the idea of presentable clothing was unnecessary where we were going.

He left the apartment, and I followed him out the front door onto the porch wearing the sweatpants I’d slept in, my coat over a cotton T-shirt. The air stung my face, my lungs.

“It’s too cold,” I said. William seemed not to hear me.

We got into Geoff’s car, which was parked in the gravel drive alongside the house. The interior was warm, as if William had just driven it home.

“Where did you go?” I asked him.

He drove expertly, one hand on the wheel, the other fiddling with the Leica in his lap. He didn’t answer me, just focused on the road beyond the windshield. There weren’t any other cars—it was too early for anyone to be out, save the people who’d been out all night. These were dark shapes in doorways, smoking last cigarettes.

I’d assumed we were going to a site he either wanted to photograph or thought I would like as a scene for my work. Occasionally, we went on outings in Geoff’s car to scout places. William found roofless barns for me, structures with weathered gray boards and lichen-covered stone foundations. Sometimes, we would be run off the property by landowners or frightened off by the report of a hunter’s gun. We were always trespassing, but neither of us cared. We wanted the shots we wanted. Abandoned places often surprised me with a subject, so those were the sites I liked best.

This time, heading out on the cold morning in my pajamas, I felt unnerved. In profile, William’s brows were set in a low scowl, his lips cracked and dry.

He was being evasive. I was suddenly awake, alert. “Where are we going?” I said again. “I might like some coffee.”

He flipped on the turn signal and pulled into a gas station, stopping at the door leading into the convenience store.

“Make it snappy,” he said, a phrase that Del often used.

“I’m not even dressed,” I said.

“Dressed enough to get a cup of coffee.”

Inside the overheated store it smelled of the hot dogs that had been turning on their spit all night. My shoes stuck to the linoleum. I poured my coffee and took it to the cashier. William hit the car horn, impatient. It bothered me, his repeating Del’s little phrase. Del spent a lot of time with the Milton girls at Anne’s. Maybe William spent time there, too. The cashier, her graying hair held back with a childish barrette, eyed the car beyond the door.

“Are you all right?” she asked me.

“He’s in a hurry,” I said.

He’s an artist, I wanted to add, but realized how ridiculous that might sound.

I got back into the car and we drove out of the city, along Cayuga Lake, and farther still, until the trees thickened along the roadside, and the pale sun that had risen during the drive barely made it through the snarl of bare branches overhead.

“Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?” I said.

William’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “You’re acting like I’m abducting you.”

“You aren’t answering my questions,” I said.

“I thought you liked surprises.” William pulled onto the shoulder suddenly, almost randomly.

“Here we are,” he said.

I got out of the car. William began to walk into the woods along a path that seemed to have been trampled earlier. We usually followed old roads—those grown through with saplings, but this seemed more a path. Every so often William would stop as if he’d lost his bearings, and we had to backtrack and head a different way. The snow clung to my pajama bottoms. There was no point in complaining about the cold or turning back. I couldn’t have said which way we’d come. It was as if we’d found ourselves dropped into the middle of a wilderness—a pair of explorers on a reality TV show.

Once, I asked him if he knew where he was going, but his frustrated glare prevented me from asking again. Finally, after thirty minutes of scrambling and climbing, we reached what seemed to be a sort of summit—a clearing in the middle of taller pines where a small stone house sat, its walls covered in lichen.

“Is it gingerbread?” I asked.

William was smiling, more in relief at having found the place than at my attempt at humor.

“Hungry?” he said. He pulled me in and kissed me—a slow, deep kiss. His chapped lips scraped mine, but just as I leaned against him for his warmth, he pulled away. I wondered at his behavior.

Footprints led to the house. William tugged me along beside him. The door wasn’t barred or locked. It had an old-fashioned iron latch that William lifted, and the door swung with a rusty groan. From the doorway, his pleasure in the way the light came into the room was evident. The place was just that, one room with a fireplace, a sink, a few cabinets, a rusted refrigerator against a wall, a small couch, a table with four chairs. The dust muted the color of everything, all of the furnishings in various forms of dissolution. Mice had eaten into the couch cushions. Trails of feces and matted animal hair carpeted the wood floor. The old wool braid rug had unwound itself. In the corners of the room twigs and grass formed burrows and nests. An intricate coating of mold swaddled the plates arranged on the table. You could see that at one time food had covered the china surfaces. The whole scene suggested that a family had gotten up from a meal and left; their belongings, the accoutrements of their lives forsaken.