Chapter 32
On the drive with Mr. Korgy, he asks me to duck at the stoplights and by the third time he apologizes.
He says he feels terrible about it but that we can’t risk someone seeing me in his car, and that it’s just for around town and that once we’re on the highway I can sit up straight.
I tell him it’s kind of him to be so considerate, but that I’m just glad to be next to him.
He caresses my hand, and as I sit here doubled over my knees in the front seat of his Subaru, I shut my eyes and I bring his hand to my heart and I feel so, so good.
“Gwen’s spending Christmas Eve out in Palmer with her parents,” he explains. “I’m really glad you were free.”
There’s no way I wouldn’t have been. I switched shifts with a co-worker. I would’ve quit if I needed to.
An hour later, we arrive at the Alyeska Resort, a chateau-style hotel surrounded by mountain peaks.
It must’ve cost him a fortune, and I tell him as much, but he says not to worry about it and that I’m worth it and that he wants this, then he checks us in and we get to our room and the moment we dump our bags on the bed, Gwen calls.
“I’ll call her back,” he says, smiling at me as he silences his phone. Then he pulls me in for a kiss. We have sex on the bed and then I go to take a shower and Mr. Korgy joins me and we have sex there too. He gets out quickly so he can call Gwen back while I finish up.
Afterward, we order room service for lunch. Grilled cheese and fries for me. A salade Nicoise for Mr. Korgy.
“I’ve gotta stay in shape for you,” he says, but when our food arrives he sneaks a couple fries.
We watch skiers hauling their gear toward the chairlift and make up life stories for them.
I go first: A bored forty-something housewife whose one reprieve is her weekly ski lesson.
She doesn’t care that she’s terrible at it.
She needs this. She’s grown sick of her corny husband, even repulsed by him, and yet can’t extract herself from the marriage.
She stays in it “for the kids,” she tells herself, unable to admit that actually, her staying in the marriage is evidence of her own personal values: consistency, familiarity, stability, routine.
She refuses to acknowledge that it’s not actually her husband who repulses her, but herself, for being unable to leave him.
Mr. Korgy compliments my ability to build a character. The specificity. The backstory.
“I’m impressed,” he nods. “And I won’t be able to beat it but I’ll try.”
He points to a man with a stringy goatee and makes up his story.
He’s a pothead retiree who refers to the slope as “his mountain” and can’t wait to feel that “soft pow” under his skis.
He teaches skiing lessons on the weekends, and when the kids ask him how to steer, he tells them, “You don’t.
You just let the mountain take you where it wants you to go. ”
We lie in bed and pull the covers up over our heads and Mr. Korgy tells me about his mother, who he says has been putting on a brave face since his father died, but he knows she’s really struggling.
“She’s been knitting scarves constantly,” he says. “She won’t stop knitting scarves. And nobody knits a scarf unless they’re so sad that feeling the sadness would be intolerable, so instead they just go numb and spend hours picking out yarn at Jo-Ann’s.”
I ask him about his father and he tells me they were never as close as he wanted to be, that he felt like he couldn’t get through to him. That only on a very rare occasion did he crack a smile.
“I never knew what was going on with the guy,” he says.
“Sounds like a dad,” I say, and then he asks me about mine, so I tell him what I remember of him from the years when he came around more.
How his breath smelled like orange Tic Tacs and how he had a habit of coughing when he was nervous, like when Mom would ask him who he’d been spending his time with or why he smelled like perfume.
“You reek of bergamot!” she’d shriek.
I tell Mr. Korgy how the last time I saw him, he would have been in his early twenties, but how he seemed so old to me. Korgy asks if I miss him, and it surprises me when I say yes.
Mr. Korgy tells me about Decembers growing up in Orlando, how they’d all put on puffer coats and run outside the second the temperature hit seventy, too eager for whatever glimpse of “winter weather” Florida was gonna get.
He tells me how much he loved Christmas, writing three-page letters to Santa, building snowmen with wet sand (sandmen), making homemade presents for his family—a handwritten poem for his mother, a painted mug for his dad, a friendship bracelet for his sister.
He says that he didn’t outgrow the magic of Christmas by eight or nine the way most boys do, that despite store-bought gifts replacing his homemade ones and Santa fading away, the magic lasted for him.
That the only thing that took the magic away was when his sister died.
“We still tried to put on happy faces and Christmas sweaters, make the same turkey dinner, decorate the tree with the same ornaments, but there was an undeniable shift. An unshakable weight. That feeling of pretending things are the same as they used to be while knowing they never will be.”
“How’d you deal with it? How’d you cope?”
“It’s embarrassing so brace yourself,” he says, chewing his lip.
“I fell into a pretty significant World of Warcraft addiction. Not blow, not alcohol. World of Warcraft. I’d stuff myself in my room for hours.
Sunup to sundown, wouldn’t even come out for meals.
My mom would bring food to me for lunch and dinner. ”
I grin with pride. Pride, at his embarrassment—that he shared it with me.
I tell him about my favorite Christmases growing up, the ones at the trailer park.
How it sounds sad just because of the words “trailer park” but how it was actually pretty great.
How every family would make a different dish and we’d all bring them out to a long foldout plastic table and make a big buffet of it.
Roast and ham and chicken, candied yams and green bean casserole and stuffing and pumpkin pie and store-brand canned crescent rolls that we’d stuff with marshmallows and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.
We’d sit in lawn chairs around the fire, wearing our warmest coats, our breath white in the cold air, and we’d sing Christmas carols or listen to one of the adults read us The Grinch or The Gift of the Magi or The Night Before Christmas.
“Don’t see anybody in the fancy zip codes with community like this,” Mom would say. And I’d nod in agreement.
On the drive back, Mr. Korgy plays me clips of comedians he loves.
Richard Pryor. George Carlin. Lenny Bruce.
He tells me the best way to understand culture at any given time is to know what people are laughing at.
I ask him what’s so important about understanding culture, and he says that’s a good question and that he’s not sure how to answer it, and then he never does.
We switch to music, songs he used to love as a teenager.
I’ve heard a few of them—“Simple Kind of Life” by No Doubt, “Bent” by Matchbox Twenty, and that song that goes “how long how lo-o-ong, will I slide” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but the rest I don’t know.
Radiohead and The Cure and the Pixies, he tells me, and I try to commit at least the chorus melodies to memory so that if they randomly come on again sometime when we’re together, I can reference them and impress him.
“Men get so impressed by references,” Mom once told me. “It’s their love language. All you gotta do is know a couple lines from The Big Lebowski and you’re golden. I once said ‘The Dude abides’ to a guy and you’d have thought I blew him.”
Mr. Korgy keeps playing songs and he throws his head back and sings along, belting off-key and laughing when his voice cracks, and I watch him.
He drops me off and as I sit up straight to get out of the car, he looks at me and he says, “Waldo, you make me feel young again.”
And I look at him and I say, “You make me feel young.”