The Progress of Love

mother’s hotel was. The hotel was closed down, but his mother still lived there. Dan’s father was dead, and she lived there alone. She took a boat with an outboard motor across the water to get her groceries. She sometimes made a mistake and called Trudy Marlene.
    The hotel wasn’t much. It was a white wooden box in a clearing by the shore. Some little boxes of cabins were stuck behind it. Dan and Trudy stayed in one of the cabins. Every cabin had a wood stove. Dan built a fire at night to take off the chill. But the blankets were damp and heavy when he and Trudy woke up in the morning.
    Dan caught fish and cooked them. He and Trudy climbed the big rock behind the cabins and picked blueberries. He asked her if she knew how to make a piecrust, and she didn’t. So he showed her, rolling out the dough with a whiskey bottle.
    In the morning there was a mist over the lake, just as you see in the movies or in a painting.
    One afternoon, Dan stayed out longer than usual, fishing. Trudy kept busy for a while in the kitchen, rubbing the dust off things, washing some jars. It was the oldest, darkest kitchen she had ever seen, with wooden racks for the dinner plates to dry in. She went outside and climbed the rock by herself, thinking she would pick some blueberries. But it was already dark under the trees; the evergreens made it dark, and she didn’t like the idea of wild animals. She sat on the rock looking down on the roof of the hotel, the old dead leaves and broken shingles. She heard a piano being played. She scrambled down the rock and followed the music around to the front of the building. She walked along the front veranda and stopped at a window, looking into the room that used to be the lounge. The room with the blackened stone fireplace, the lumpy leather chairs, the horrible mounted fish.
    Dan’s mother was there, playing the piano. A tall, straight-backed old woman, with her gray-black hair twisted into such a tiny knot. She sat and played the piano, without any lights on, in the half-dark, half-bare room.
    Dan had said that his mother came from a rich family. She had taken piano lessons, dancing lessons; she had gone around the world when she was a young girl. There was a picture of her on a camel. But she wasn’t playing a classical piece, the sort of thing you’d expect her to have learned. She was playing “It’s Three O’Clock in the Morning.” When she got to the end, she started in again. Maybe it was a special favorite of hers, something she had dancedto in the old days. Or maybe she wasn’t satisfied yet that she had got it right.
    Why does Trudy now remember this moment? She sees her young self looking in the window at the old woman playing the piano. The dim room, with its oversize beams and fireplace and the lonely leather chairs. The clattering, faltering, persistent piano music. Trudy remembers that so clearly and it seems she stood outside her own body, which ached then from the punishing pleasures of love. She stood outside her own happiness in a tide of sadness. And the opposite thing happened the morning Dan left. Then she stood outside her own unhappiness in a tide of what seemed unreasonably like love. But it was the same thing, really, when you got outside. What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life—what do they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is that all?
    She goes into the front hall and listens for any noise from upstairs.
    All quiet there, all medicated.
    The phone rings right beside her head.
    “Are you still there?” Robin says. “You’re not gone?”
    “I’m still here.”
    “Can I run over and ride back with you? I didn’t do my run earlier because it was so hot.”
    You threw the jug. You could have killed me. Yes.
    Kelvin, waiting at the card table, under the light, looks bleached and old. There’s a pool of light whitening his brown hair. His face sags, waiting. He looks old, sunk into himself, wrapped in a thick bewilderment, nearly lost to her.
    “Kelvin, do you pray?” says Trudy. She didn’t know she was going to ask him that. “I mean, it’s none of my business. But, like for anything specific?”
    He’s got an answer for her, which is rather surprising. Hepulls his face up, as if he might have felt the tug he needed to bring him to the surface.
    “If I was smart enough to know what to pray for,” he says, “then I wouldn’t have to.”
    He smiles at her, with some oblique notion of