We're in Trouble by Christopher Coake Page A

his shoulders began to gleam with sweat.
    And he was good. You do not have to understand the particulars of an art to know when an artist performs well. I knew, watching Jozef, that his artistry surpassed mine by orders of magnitude.
    He defied gravity, just because I asked him to do it—and when he dropped off the last hold onto the floor, I was ready to make love to him, I was ready to do anything he asked.
    His soul had lifted, too—when he turned to me, in an instant before he grew embarrassed and flushed again, I saw triumph, I saw passion. A muscle in his chest pulsed with blood, and it was all I could do not to press my lips against him there, to feel that fluttering, that life under my tongue.
    You should take me out again, I said to him. Tomorrow night.
    He smiled at me, slyly, and buttoned his shirt across his chest.
III.
    The sun is up high outside the bedroom window. For a while I lie still, trying to remember the night before, and when I must have slept. I hear laughter from the kitchen—Stane’s—and Karel’s deep voice answering. And I remember, with a flood of shame.
    And, still, disappointment underneath it all.
    I cannot hide from them. I put on my robe and walk into the living room, my feet numb on the cold wood floors. Stane and Karel are looking at the laptop in the kitchen. The whole house smells of coffee and bacon; Karel has been cooking what he knows to cook.
    Good morning, lazy, Stane says giggling.
    Aren’t we clever, I say and ruffle his hair.
    Karel glances up from the computer and says, Coffee’s on. He gives me a brief look—like a dog that is sorry for something and expects to be hit.
    Any news? I ask.
    Papa’s almost at the top, Stane says. The line’s only this far away. He holds his thumb and forefinger apart.
    The weather’s good, Karel says. He should make it.
    Well, that’s good. I sit down; I have no idea what else to say.
    Now that I am with them, we eat breakfast, though the clock says it is almost noon. Again I feel that strange disconnect—I eat strips of bacon, and thousands of kilometers away my husband is struggling up the headwall of Shipton’s Peak. He is, right now, doing what no one in the world has ever done. He writes his name in history as I sip my coffee.
    I was thinking, Karel says, that after lunch we could all go for a walk. I’ve wanted to take a look at the Roman wall. I have Stane’s support for this plan, don’t I?
    He does, Stane says eagerly. Can we go?
    This sounds like a grand idea to me, too—far better than sitting inside the house waiting for the phone to ring. And I am grateful to the point of tears that Karel is still here, that he is trying to pretend we did not do what we did.
    I shower and dress after breakfast, and I dawdle in the house for a moment while Stane and Karel wait for me in the yard. This is when I decide to forget the cell phone. The weather outside is beautiful, and, one way or another, I would like to be in that world, not inside my head, imagining asphyxiation, frostbite, a four-kilometer drop.
    Then we walk. Across the valley the sun turns the limestone Alps from gray to a warm blond, and down lower the blankets of pine are rich and green. The river at the valley floor is not so much a color as a collection of lights and reflections of the land. We stay close alongside the Roman wall, which is really not much to see—it is mostly low and crumbling, with occasional tall pillars, overhung by trees, in places collapsed by growing roots.
    Stane ranges ahead of Karel and me, like a shepherd dog looping around to see that his flock is safe, before returning toscout the road ahead. He has a bagful of his toy men with him, what looks like a whole regiment, and whenever he returns he has one or another clutched in his fist. He talks to them, sometimes.
    Karel walks next to me with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, looking from side to side across the