The Risk Pool

Friday evening she’d grow more distant, superficially affectionate, it seemed to me, without opening herself to the possibility of real passion. During the week, when she knew I wasn’t foolish enough to think I could alter her resolve in an hour or two, she’d kiss me open-mouthed, drawing me eagerly toward our bed where she would receive and return my affections almost desperately, but Saturday night always found her more playful than loving, and her lips were then dry and cool. When I suggested we go someplace for the weekend, she always said, “Not a chance, pal. You think I don’t know what you’re up to?”
    In fact, it was often Leigh who encouraged me to visit my father in Mohawk as an alternative to the certain unpleasantness of a weekend in the city, where every suggestion I made—a movie, dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, even some jazz on the stereo—was likely to be interpreted as my crossing over some invisible boundary she had staked out without telling me. “I don’t see why you have to act this way,” I told her. “You’re behaving like a seventeen-year-old playing virgin the morning after. You’ve already given me all there is to give. This holding back, this pretending you don’t love me when it suits your purpose is plain silly.”
    I shared exactly none of this with my father, of course. Therewere plenty of things in the world that he was pretty shrewd about, but he was even more helpless and confused around women than I. Neither my mother nor Eileen had been exactly complicated, but he’d shaken his head over the two of them as if comprehending what they wanted from him required a minute understanding of astrophysics. Perhaps Leigh was not so much more complex, but she seemed so to me, and I wasn’t about to betray my confusion to a man who could only deepen it, not when he seemed to believe I had things pretty well in hand.
    And so, every other weekend, or every third one, depending on his condition after the most recent treatments and how well he’d recovered from their debilitating effects, I went to Mohawk to see my father. Miraculously, throughout the strong chemotherapy, he kept most of his wiry hair, though he claimed his shower drain was full every day. The third or fourth day after his treatment he’d start eating again, even if it was only an apple at first, his appetite improving daily until it was time to go back to the hospital. Sometimes, in the middle of a meal, however, he would break out in a cold sweat and begin to shake. The cure for that was a cold beer. He couldn’t stand the taste of the first one, but after that he’d be all right. He was under strict orders not to drink, of course, but he said that half the time he neither drank nor wanted to. Besides, beer wasn’t really drinking anyway. According to his doctors, the tumor on his lung was shrinking, and that was the main thing. “You can’t give up every damn thing and still call it living, right?” he said, nudging me. Then, when I didn’t respond, “Right?”
    “Whatever,” I told him.
    Then he’d put his thin arm on the bar, hand open. “Wanna arm-wrestle?”
    “No.”
    “Good,” he said. “This arm is about the only thing I got that still works, and it’d be just like you to break it.”
    “Your mouth still works,” I said.
    He decided to ignore me. “Besides,” he went on, “if I ever beat you, it’d be pretty embarrassing, getting your ass kicked by a man with about two weeks to live.”
    The Christmas holidays found me in New York by myself. Leigh flew to Colorado to be with her mother, who was living alone inthe large family house, Leigh’s father having divorced her and remarried two years before, relocating in Seattle. I had known for some time that her father was part of what was not right between us. She’d been even more devastated than her mother to learn that for many years he had carried on a secret affair with a woman known to both her mother and herself, and who had often been a guest in their home. Leigh’s own husband had been a good deal less discreet in his philandering, and I think she gave far less thought to him and what he’d done to her directly than to her father and his indirect breach of faith. The old man had not only fooled her but shaken her faith in her own judgment at a time when she could have used a little reinforcement. (The revelations of her husband’s and her father’s betrayals had virtually coincided.) New York was not