Into the Valley by Ruth Galm

luck?”
    â€œNo, I’ve just been driving.” She did not feel like knitting together the explanation in her mind. She drank her scotch.
    â€œWe haven’t been here long,” the man said. “Still finishing the dissertation. We’re out from New York. That’s where my wife is now. That faraway galaxy called New York . . . ” He peered dolefully into his drink.
    â€œI’m from the East too.”
    He did not seem to hear her. “So you’re really just driving? No obligations, no appointments? Sounds lawless.”
    She fidgeted. Some of the papers from the couch fell onto the floor. She bent to pick them up.
    â€œDon’t bother about those. No point.”
    â€œDoes your wife like it out here?”
    â€œOh, she’s busy enough keeping me in line, you know.” He laughed but it was not cheery. He fiddled with a thread on the arm of his chair. “It’s been an adjustment for her, cooking more, keeping up a house instead of an apartment. I mean, she paints and sketches too, of course.” He pointed at the charcoals.
    The drawings troubled B. She tried to find them modern, but the nipples were out of proportion, bellicose. “They’re very interesting,” she said.
    â€œHow old are you?”
    Suddenly a chorus of drunk voices crowded in through the windows. “Well, helloooo, Professor! Helloooo, helloooo! Another one of your ‘conferences’?” Howls of laughter, catcalls.
    The man raised his hand in embarrassed greeting. It was impossible with all the lights to make out any faces in the dark.
    â€œDon’t give that grade ’til she earns it!” someone yelled, then more howls of laughter. The man’s face looked like it would turn red if it weren’t so mellowed. A few more mutterings and hoots and the commotion faded out.
    â€œThe frats stay here all summer,” he explained. “Amazing they survive to fall.”
    â€œThirty.”
    â€œPardon?”
    â€œI’m thirty years old.”
    He looked her up and down. “Well. What a nice change. I’m usually in the company of nubile student-girls—severely off-limits, of course—or mommies and widows.” He got up and went into the kitchen. She heard the slamming of cabinets and the suction of a freezer door, ice clinking.
    When he came back, he held a refilled drink in one hand and the bottle in the other. He sat back across from her in the slouchy arm chair, tearing more thread out of the upholstery, widening the hole. “ I saw pale kings, and princes too,/Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;/They cried—‘La belle Dame sans merci/Hath thee in thrall!’ You made me think of that. Keats. My dissertation.”
    â€œWell, thank you . . . I think . . . It’s lovely.”
    â€œWhat I find lovely, and fascinating, is exactly what a thirty-year-old woman is doing driving around the valley for no reason.”
    â€œIt’s not for no reason.”
    â€œNo?”
    The lights felt momentarily blinding. She drank more scotch. “Can you turn some of the lights off, please? I have a bit of a headache.”
    â€œWhatever the lady wants.” He walked around the room and hallway until all the lights were off except a small lamp on an end table. She picked at a stain on her dress, hoping he would drop the subject.
    â€œIt’s funny,” he went on, “I find I can talk more easily to single women of a certain age. I tend to go out of bounds. Not always appreciated in normal, civilized speak. I’ve found that mature-yet-not-coarsened sensibilities appreciate the out-of-bounds from time to time.”
    â€œI can’t talk to people easily,” she said. The dimmed room relaxed her; it might be the alcohol, she realized. “In college I was passable at it, but not anymore . . .
    â€œWhat do you and your wife talk about, usually?” she asked.
    â€œHa! That’s funny.”