Problems With People: Stories Read online

  ALSO BY DAVID GUTERSON

  Songs for a Summons

  Descent:

  A Memoir of Madness

  Ed King

  The Other

  Our Lady of the Forest

  East of the Mountains

  Snow Falling on Cedars

  Family Matters:

  Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

  The Country Ahead of Us,

  the Country Behind

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by David Guterson

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Selected stories in this work originally appeared in the following: “Hush” and “Paradise” in The American Scholar; “Shadow” in Boulevard; “Photograph” as “The Drowned Son” in Harper’s; “Pilanesberg” in The Indiana Review; “Hot Springs” and “Krassavitseh” in Narrative; “Tenant” in The New England Review; and “Politics” in ZYZZYVA.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Music for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Not to Touch the Earth,” words and music by the Doors. Copyright © 1968 (Renewed) Doors Music Co. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Music.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Guterson, David.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Problems with People : Stories / David Guterson. — First Edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-35148-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) —

  ISBN 978-0-385-35149-2 (eBook)

  I. Title

  PS3557.U846A6 2014 813’.54—dc23 2013029700

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket photograph: Untitled #163, 2011, from the series “Until the Kingdom Comes” by Simen Johan, courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

  Jacket design by Kelly Blair

  v3.1_r1

  To Charles Johnson

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Paradise

  Tenant

  Pilanesberg

  Politics

  Feedback

  Hot Springs

  Krassavitseh

  Shadow

  Photograph

  Hush

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  Paradise

  They went in late September, starting out on I-5, which she handled by staying in the right lane with ample braking distance, keeping her hands at nine and three on the wheel, and disdaining speeders and tailgaters. No problem there—he found her driving style charming enough. She was a silver beauty in a dark-blue Honda Element—one of those boxy, hip-to-be-square cars—with nearly inaudible public-radio chatter on fade, and all of that was fine, too. She wore a jean jacket with mother-of-pearl buttons, an ironed pastel skirt, and suede lace sandals. Her eyes were green, her smile was warm, and she didn’t talk just to fill space. She seemed self-sufficient but not cold about it. In her politics, she was not so liberal as to be obnoxious, but not so conservative as to suggest one-upmanship. She didn’t pretend to be an organic farmer, kitchen goddess, world traveler, yoga master, or humanitarian; neither was she reactionary with regard to those personas. She was green but not gloomy and, though not indifferent to approaching sixty, not obsessed by it, either. She had a good sense of humor—quiet and subtle. She didn’t expect to live forever via exercise and a healthy diet. She understood that he was still in the aftermath—damaged goods—without making it central to the way she treated him. In short, so far he wasn’t disenchanted. But he still expected to be.

  How had this happened—this trip to Paradise? Via match.com, that was the simple answer. The idea that he would need match.com—he wouldn’t have predicted it, hadn’t seen that he would go there. But match.com was what people did now, and actually, it made sense. It saved single people trouble and grief, decreased their disappointments and misunderstandings. Digitalized, you put yourself out there, minus the pretense that it was other than what it was. You cut to the chase without preliminaries. And the people you met were just like you—they’d also resorted to match.com—so you didn’t have to feel embarrassed, really, unless you wanted to do that together and mutually laugh at yourselves.

  They’d skipped that step—the self-loathing self-punctures—opting instead for straightforwardness in a wine bar, where he told her immediately about his wife, and she told him about her former husband, long remarried. He described his children—a boy out of college and a girl still in, both thousands of miles from him—and she described her energetic twin sons, who’d found good marriage partners, stayed in Seattle, and started a successful business together, selling “hand-forged” donuts. He knew about her work from her match.com profile, but asked about it anyway, as a matter of course: sociology at Seattle University, and doing research, right now, on social networks and epidemiology. His turn arrived: commercial litigation, specializing in securities fraud. What exactly was securities fraud? And so they got through their first date.

  Their second—which he initiated, though the first had been arduous and painful—was for an early dinner and Russian chamber music. Russian chamber music was her idea, something she had enough of an interest in to have accepted, gratis, two tickets from a colleague; they might as well go, why not, they agreed, since neither knew the first thing about Russian chamber music but both were willing to find out about it. At dinner in a warehouse full of people half their age, he discovered that his date was allergic to peanuts, a light eater, and a morning lap swimmer. The World Health Organization, in conjunction with FIND—Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics—had sent her during her sabbatical, last year, to study sleeping sickness in Uganda. No, she hadn’t traveled elsewhere in Africa, but she had gone to Geneva for a WHO convention in the middle of her Ugandan research, and to Dublin on her way home to see a friend with ALS. Dublin was a subject he could talk about a little. He’d played semi-pro basketball in Cork for three seasons. A minor sport there—give them hurling instead. What’s hurling? she wondered genially. Golf without rules, he replied.

  Did he play golf, then? Never, he assured her. Golf courses, they agreed, were a waste of water, although, like cemeteries, they relieved the eye of urban density. What, then? For exercise? He rode a bicycle to work five days a week. He confessed to dressing like a bike nerd to do it—the polyester jersey, the Lycra shorts, the waterproof helmet cover, the fingerless gloves. The fluorescent, high-visibility colors. The weekend racer’s flourishes and trim. Was all of that a mistake? He couldn’t tell. Self-deprecation could easily backfire. Calling yourself a geek: surely counterproductive. He shut up about bicycling and engaged her on politics: what did she think about tearing down the viaduct and replacing it with a tunnel through downtown Seattle? They ate, split the bill, and walked toward the chamber music: twilight in the city, just a little car breeze; a waif with ANYTHING HELPS scrawled on cardboard. “Maybe,” he thought, “my chinos are wrong,” but she hadn’t really dressed up, either—black with a little sparkle in her sweater. Still, she had that notable feature—the lustrous head of bobbed silver hair—that would cover her when
semi-formal was required, as it might be required for Russian chamber music.

  As it turned out, he didn’t love or hate the chamber music, had no strong feelings one way or the other about the string quartet and attractive young pianist playing Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich, but he did notice something in Benaroya Hall that spurred him toward a third date. Sitting beside this new and unfamiliar woman in box seats over a corner of the proscenium, he was keenly aware of her well-coiffed hair, her straight carriage, and her hands in her lap, and he found himself excited. And scared.

  Their third date was for dinner at an Italian restaurant that afforded plenty of privacy. There they broached sex in plain, honest terms. He told her he didn’t know what would happen in bed. He said he hadn’t slept with anyone but his wife for twenty-six years—then add on the six months since she’d died of a heart attack while in the middle of leaving him for someone new.

  Mount Rainier was cloud-bound, cloaked, helmeted, gone. The new woman in his life got off I-5 at Fife and did battle with Puyallup—its traffic lights, turn lanes, and arterial aggressiveness—by dint of the same methodical approach that had seen her through the freeway’s fury. She showed no sign of needing the right coffee shop, missing her cell phone, or worrying a list in her head. She didn’t deplore the South Hill Mall, or either of the Walmart Supercenters they passed, or the growth of Graham, or clear-cuts. Nor did she make a big deal about the apples being picked by ladder climbers wearing vest bags, or the scarlet vine-maple leaves right now at their best, or roadside fruit stands. They passed through a stretch of low-lying fog, small farms, lakes, and alder thickets. Here the light was even more dour, and the pastures were clammy, hoofed down to mud. Was that worth talking about? Was it corny and off-putting to be enamored of the fall landscape, even in a muted and prosaic way? Should he talk about these matters—fall and its merits, fall and its sadness, fall and the perils in too much description of it—or should he go on saying nothing, play it safe? Silence didn’t seem exactly right, but he felt hamstrung and chastised by his own mental chatter. Maybe it was better not to talk.

  It rained in earnest. There were no cute towns, just trailers and blight, mini-marts and badly named burger joints. They entered Mount Rainier National Park and, on the road to Paradise, walked to Narada Falls beneath umbrellas. Now she, too, had little to say. They were both silent, watching the waterfall in the rain. Driving again, she set her teeth against her lower lip. The rain-pelted slopes of the mountain came into view, and the last of the blue September gentians, wind-whipped. The lodge was as advertised—grand and hand-crafted, rustic and Gothic, simple but complicated, well appointed but crude. It seemed to him a massive mistake, everything too big, too lodgelike in earnest. He kept this to himself, though. He felt scattered, apprehensive. They checked in on two credit cards and went to their room—a standard with a queen bed, no television, no phone—at the end of the hall on the fourth floor of the annex, with a view of the Tatoosh Range, weather permitting. But right now, the weather didn’t permit.

  I might as well be open, he said, taking the room’s one chair, a wooden desk chair. I’m nervous.

  Me, too.

  I’m losing my cool. Could we pull the shades? It’s me I don’t want to see, not you. I don’t want to look at myself right now. No, I’m not going to whine the whole time, I promise, but—

  Sure.

  It’s time, he said. Thank you.

  He stooped to unzip the bag he’d brought, reached in, and told her, I thought I might—you know—need this. He showed her a bottle of pills.

  Okay.

  Excuse me. Just for a minute.

  He went into the bathroom and took the pill with water. Privacy allowed him to agitate his doubts and shore himself up simultaneously. Who if not her? But this was a mistake. His wife was gone, but this was too sudden. Quietly, he brushed his teeth, then came back to find her in the chair with her handbag settled and open in her lap. While he’d been in the bathroom, she’d drawn the shades; there was no more view of mountain meadows. Yet it still wasn’t particularly dark. Everything was plain and gray in this light. Let’s just get on the bed, he said, and lie there for a while. Not that I want to dictate to you. But that’s what I need to do. Is that pathetic?

  She closed her bag, set it on the floor, and unbuckled her sandals, with her silver hair hanging. It unfurled, he thought, like a Möbius strip. What do you think? she asked.

  New territory.

  Maybe I should tell you something. Because love and death—I’ve been there, too.

  Sure, he said. Break the ice.

  Barefoot, she got on the bed. She sat up next to him with her back against the headboard and her hands pressed palm to palm against her skirt. While she talked, he lay with his forearms across his eyes, as if by negating the room he might see better, but actually this was a habit of his, something he did to live inside himself—lie down, cover his face—for hours at a time, at home, in the evenings, instead of watching TV or reading.

  I grew up in farm country, she said, but that doesn’t really describe it. Do you know where Odessa is? In eastern Washington? I grew up thirteen miles from Odessa, in what they call the Channeled Scablands. We grew wheat. It was really pretty simple. But let me back up a little. Do you know the Spokane Floods? I’m terrible on eras, but a long time ago there were the Spokane Floods. They took the country down to black rock—basalt. Except for these islands of good soil: the hills. So what got farmed were the fingers, the islands of soil—the benches and the feet of benches. Flying in from Minneapolis, you see it. The dark channels are the rock, and the yellow is soil, because our soil was loess, and loess looks yellow. Wind brings it. It’s like dust, but it grows wheat. Dryland wheat, no irrigating. My mother spent a lot of time battling with loess, and my father had farmer’s lung, probably because of it. He coughed all the time. At night especially. We had seven thousand acres and a pile of combine parts. My dad was always worrying about weather. Everything was always touch and go, marginal, at the mercy—one more bad season and we’d have to go, but where? That was a topic of ongoing conversation. It’s the bleakest of the bleak kind of farming, what you grow when nothing else will grow. Odessa—Odessa is Russian Mennonite. Actually German. Or, rather, German Russian—Germans who migrated to Russia but then came here. Isolationists. They want to do their own thing. They go in for the hardscrabble places like Odessa. We weren’t Mennonite or Russian or German. We actually lived closer to a place called Lamona, but Lamona had nothing, so we went to Odessa. Lamona was a siding, a railroad siding. So I went to school in Odessa on a yellow bus. And the grocery store, but not the doctor. You needed a doctor, you drove to Spokane. When you were really going big, you went to Spokane. An hour and a half. We drove up to Davenport and went that way. Do you remember Expo? World’s fair in Spokane? I worked at Expo in ’74. I was twenty-two. But I’m ahead of myself. What year was it when I was sixteen? It was …’68. But I had no idea what was going on in the world. We were so out there, the only connection was Time magazine. At the little library in town, which was open two days a week and about the size of this room. Plus television, except we pulled in only one channel at our house, KREM, which was CBS. People say ’68 was seminal, but Odessa? I remember hearing about a boy from Wilson Creek, not far from where I grew up, who got killed in Vietnam.… Sixty-eight, that was Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy. I mean, I heard about it.… Okay—you get my point.

  With his forearms still across his eyes, he said, The tulies.

  Anyway, there was this boy. He was just this boy I thought was handsome, nobody special, just one of the boys I went to school with, but he was older. Most of the boys there, they were farm boys, like this boy. Billy, Tommy, names like that. This boy was named Clifton Rider, and he was eighteen, and he lived closer to Harrington. Two years older. The bus I took to school would start picking up kids toward Harrington, and then it would come our way. So I would always see this Clifton Rider, and he would always be sitting way at the back
with his brothers—he had two brothers. And their friends. Boys. We didn’t—I mean, my sister and I—we didn’t go back there, we sat toward the front with a group of girls. Our whole school was eighty, ninety kids. Everybody knew everybody. There weren’t really cliques. The kids on the sports team were the kids in the school play; otherwise, there’s no school play.

  What about Clifton?

  Clifton, too. He was okay. Not the star of anything, just … average, except for his looks. At least, I thought so. Not a tall guy, not a boy like a lot of high-school boys, with a lot of body language—pretty quiet guy. Very down-to-earth. They grew wheat like we did, the Riders, but they had potatoes and hay, too, or at least they did in ’68. Sometimes we went for groceries to Harrington, because my parents knew the store owners there—my dad was in their Lions for some reason, the Harrington Lions instead of Odessa, probably because of something petty—that area was petty. So we would see the Rider kids around there in Harrington. Clifton, the oldest. My sister and I never talked to them, but we knew who they were, and we knew their reputation, which is that they were Pentecostals, whereas just about everyone else around there was Lutheran. I shouldn’t say that. There were also Congregationalists. And Seventh-day Adventists. But my family was Lutheran, pretty seriously Lutheran. We went to church every Sunday. Our pastor didn’t push hard. The Pentecostals—people thought they were extremists. Just rumors, the things you’d think of—speaking in tongues, laying on of hands. So the Riders, they were associated with that. One thing they did do, they had the dress code in their family. The Riders looked neat. Short haircuts, and they always had their shirts buttoned up and tucked in. All three of the boys were sort of bullish in appearance. Like their dad. Thick neck, wide face, heavy brow, even when they were just kids. Which can be, actually, more expressive than you think. I mean, when Clifton was up or down, you knew it.