The Risk Pool

through gears and stop signs all the way to the distant highway.

39
    That night at the Wards’ was the first of a new working arrangement. Tria’s mother met me at the door and explained that her daughter was not at home. The pages I had worked on the previous Friday had been typed up and added to the others in the plastic tray. Over three hundred pages worth now. About half the manuscript, I guessed.
    Nor was Tria in evidence the rest of the week, though when I arrived in the evenings the air was often rich with her perfume. The previous night’s work was always typed neatly and added face-down in the stack. Even more disturbing than her absence from the proceedings was her mother’s renewed presence. I began to feel as though I’d been the victim of some cruel slight of hand. I’d started out wooing the pretty daughter and ended up with the old hag, the basic plot of countless bedroom farces, only in my case the switch had been made not in the dark but rather in broad daylight as I looked on. Among the many reasons I wished ardently for Tria’s return was the grotesque possibility that someone would tumble to the fact that Mrs. Ward and I were alone in the house every evening and draw an unnatural conclusion.
    I didn’t have to search the house to know that Tria was not there. Her yellow Chevette was always gone when I arrived, her lingering perfume strong at first, then dissipating as the evening wore on. I probably would have worked late and waited for the sound of her car pulling into the garage were it not for the fact that Mrs. Ward no longer retired at nine, the way she had when Tria and I were working together. Now it was clearly her intention to remain up until I finished each night, as if she didn’t trust me to lock up on my way out. When she yawned, I suggested she go to bed, but she wouldn’t hear of it, no matter how her eyelidsdrooped. She fed us strong dark coffee that wired me good, but hadn’t the slightest effect upon herself.
    The main reason I wished she’d go to bed was so that I could stay up late and be done with the whole project as soon as possible. I no longer really wanted to go out there. Drew Littler’s remark that I could have it all, as far as he was concerned, rang in my ears, and the small library seemed more claustrophobic each night. As I paced around its perimeter to stretch my legs, clear my head, search for oxygen, I began to feel about it the way I suspected Jack Ward himself must have felt—that there was nothing I valued there, nothing of myself, nothing I wanted.
    Why then did I make the journey up that hill through the dark corridor of trees each evening? Part of it may have been, as Drew Littler suggested, the rather satisfying notion that I was permitted to drive my father’s convertible between the stone pillars that had once been a barrier to Drew Littler and me. Perhaps the fact that I had a standing invitation to visit continued to mean something long after the spell of the white jewel house itself had been broken. Maybe, in the end, that’s what such spells and such houses are about.
    And, too, part of the reason I continued to haunt the Ward House that August was guilt. I wanted to square things with Tria—though I wasn’t sure whether this was possible or even what it might entail. She had taken me into her bed, and I had betrayed her in the classic way that Mohawk men betrayed their women, perhaps the way most men betray most women. I planned a rather elaborate confession on the subject, an admission that I was unworthy of her, that she could do far better, that I was and always had been both selfish and corrupt. Moreover I had been treating her the way my father had treated my mother, the way
her
father had treated
her
mother. I was perpetuating … well, I wasn’t sure what, but I was perpetuating something. All of this was supposed to make her feel better. I know it made me feel better (I was twenty-four) as I rehearsed these observations.
    But the real reason I kept pushing my father’s convertible up the hill each evening was that in working over Tria’s grandfather’s history, I had rediscovered something of the strange, almost mystical delight I had felt in the Mohawk Free Library those years I had lived with my father. There in my cool little corner of the stacks, surrounded by books and periodicals I but dimlyunderstood, I had felt connected to something as large and wondrous as the planet itself. With no teacher to direct my