Sea Glass

by Anita Shreve

  Sexton catches a whiff of whiskey breath across the bank president’s desk. It isn’t even eleven in the morning. Kenneth Rowley is youngish for a bank president — thirty-eight, maybe forty. He must have inherited a job he didn’t want, Sexton decides, letting his eyes slide around the room: mahogany-paneled walls, windowsills so high he could rest his chin on them, an oddly immaculate desk.

  “No, I haven’t,” Sexton says. “But I certainly would like to.”

  Actually, Sexton isn’t sure if this is true. He likes adventure well enough, and the open road more than most, but what exactly keeps the plane aloft? he has always wanted to know.

  A secretary of indeterminate age enters the room carrying two tall glasses of iced coffee on a silver tray. She sets the tray down, smooths the skirt of her summer-weight tweed suit, and eyes Sexton. Miss Alexander, her name is, if memory serves. Sexton winks at her as she leaves.

  “Cream?” Rowley asks Sexton.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Bizarre the way they’re all going for a record of some sort,” Rowley says. “Portsmouth to Rome, I hear now.”

  Sexton watches the ivory liquid swirl through the coffee and wonders when he should begin his pitch.

  “What are you driving?” Rowley asks, stirring the cream. He slides a glass on a coaster across the desk toward Sexton.

  “A Buick,” Sexton says. “A twenty-six.”

  “Like it?”

  “Love it,” Sexton says.

  “Have you seen the new Essex?”

  “Not up close.”

  “Bought one for my wife last week,” Rowley says, leaning back in his chair. “Hydraulic shock absorbers. Four-wheel brakes. Radiator shelters. Air cleaner. Paid six hundred ninety-five.”

  “How’s it drive?”

  “Smooth as a fucked mink. You married, Mr. Beecher?”

  “A month tomorrow.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Sexton takes a sip of coffee and thinks of Honora back at the cabin. He likes to imagine her still in her nightgown, the one with the loose straps that slide over her shoulders. When they woke earlier in the morning, the sheets and the pillows were damp.

  Rowley sets his coffee glass down. “So what have you got to show me, Mr. Beecher?” he asks.

  “Well,” Sexton begins, divesting himself of his glass of iced coffee and sitting slightly forward. “We’re awfully excited about our nineteen thirty line. Of course, we still carry the Number

  Six and the Number Seven, and we have another model I’d like to tell you about — I’ll get to that in a minute — and also a terrific new tool called a Copiograph machine that will just knock your socks off, but the machine I think you’ll be the most interested in is our new flat-surface accounting-writing machine.” Sexton pauses for emphasis. “It’s a machine that will allow you to keep in touch with every transaction from every department without adding an extra man to the payroll,” he says. “It consolidates accounting methods into a simple, unified plan. I’ve got a picture of it right here.” Sexton reaches into his leather case and pulls out a catalog. He finds the page and hands it across the desk.

  “What do you think about those Athletics?” Rowley asks as he looks at the brochure.

  “I think they can go all the way,” Sexton says. If Rowley reads the description of the accounting-writing machine all the way to the end, Sexton knows he’ll have his sale.

  “Boston’s pitiful,” Rowley says. He puts the catalog, description unread, down on the desk. “What’s this thing going to cost me?”

  “I’ve got one in the car,” Sexton says, evading the money question. “Why don’t you let me bring it in and demonstrate it for you?”

  Rowley is silent, as if he’s just remembered an important appointment.

  “A thing worth having is worth having now,” Sexton says.

  Rowley pushes himself away from his desk on his roll-away chair. The chair seems to travel pretty far, putting some distance between him and Sexton.

  “Putting it off is like paying more for it,” Sexton says, trying to relax his shoulders. “I’ve got that new Copiograph machine I was telling you about in my car too. Which would you prefer I bring in? Should I bring in both?”

  Sexton makes as if to rise from the chair.

  The bank president wheels himself back to the desk. He studies Sexton for a moment. From a drawer, he takes out two shot glasses and a bottle. “What do you say we chase that coffee?” Rowley says.

  Honora

  In Portland, Honora and Sexton have a bathroom with hot water in the room. They flip a coin to see who will get the first bath. When steam clouds the mirror, Honora rubs a spot clear with the end of her fist. Her hair is matted to her head, and her skin is pink from the nearly scalding water. She cannot discern any physical differences between her married state and her single state — no obvious contentment or niggling unease. Her eyes are still wide and biscuit brown, and her eyebrows definitely need plucking. Possibly her mouth looks looser than it was, and she thinks, on balance, that this is a good sign. Unhappy women, she’s observed from her years spent behind the grille at the bank, often have pinched mouths with vertical lines shooting upward to the nose.

  On the road, Honora washes the stains from the butter yellow suit and rinses out underwear, which she hangs discreetly from the bottom rungs of wooden chairs. Sexton likes to eat in diners or in cheap restaurants, explaining to Honora the mathematics of expense accounts and commissions. If a man is allowed fifty cents a day for food and spends more than that (or if he and his wife spend more than that), then the $5.20 he’s made in commissions that day might only be $4.70, correct?

  If there’s a client who has direct ties to the home office, Sexton goes alone to the appointment. Honora stays behind in the cabin and reads, propped up against the quilt-thin pillows. The headboards sometimes jiggle, and the smell of mildew rises up from the woolen blankets. She reads magazines — Woman’s Home Companion and The Saturday Evening Post — and books she has bought on the road at filling stations or near the diners where they eat. Dark Laughter. An American Tragedy. Point Counter Point. If it is cold, she reads in her pink sweater; if it’s hot and the cabin doesn’t have a fan, she sits by a window. She imagines she can almost hear Sexton’s pitch several miles away, and she wonders how he is faring without her. Sometimes she stands at the window of the cabin, a semicircle of other cabins spreading out to either side of her, and watches for the Buick to turn down the drive.

  If the weather is fine, Honora goes for a walk. She strolls through towns that seem little more than a school, a church, a town hall, and a bank, which she passes trying to catch a glimpse of Sexton. She has household money in her purse, and if the town has a fiveand-dime she buys a rubber-coated dish drainer or a juice glass with oranges and green leaves painted on it. Once she buys a recipe book and spends a day in a cabin composing menus on the back of one of Sexton’s triplicate forms. In the cities, she walks the streets until her feet hurt. She makes her way down to the harbor and climbs back up to a city square and rests on the benches in the parks with other women in hats and gloves. She walks faster in the cities than she does in the towns, a mantle of anxiety riding her shoulders, and it isn’t until she reaches New Bedford and is walking along a street that parallels the harbor that she realizes that cities remind her of Halifax. What she feels along her shoulders, she realizes, is a hunching against impending disaster.

  Honora likes to walk the tracks. She puts her hands inside the pockets of her dress, sets her cloche on her head, and points herself north or south along the railroad tracks. She appreciates the way they stretch out seemingly forever — the ultimate open road. No stop signs, no traffic, seldom an encounter with any other person, though there is plenty of life. The backs of houses that no one ever sees. Wash on a line. An old Ford up on blocks. Summer tea in a jar on a picnic table next to a well. An open garage filled with rusted bits of machinery. Sometimes she passes another woman in an apron and a head scarf, hanging o
ut her laundry, and she and the woman wave to each other. But if Honora sees a man on a back stoop smoking a cigarette, a man who is home in the middle of the day, she doesn’t wave. When a train passes, she steps back from the gravel bed and waits for the engineer to give her a quick salute.

  “What did you do today?” Sexton asks, flushed from a recent sale and running his fingers through his well-oiled hair. Snapping his suspenders off his shoulders. Yanking the knot out of his tie.

  “I went walking,” she says.

  “It’s from my mother,” Honora says.

  “What’s new?”

  “May isn’t doing well.” Honora is holding her own breast through the cotton of her blouse. She puts her hand down.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Sexton says.

  When they returned to the house, an air of reproach had permeated the rooms, like that of a once-favored dog who’d been left alone all day and hadn’t yet been walked. Honora moved from room to room, holding the letter that was waiting for her on the floor of the front hallway, and it wasn’t until she’d inspected the entire house that she had allowed herself to sit at the kitchen table and read it.

  Sexton pours himself a drink from a bottle of illegal bourbon a client gave him to celebrate a deal. Six No. 7’s at a 4 percent discount to a textile manufacturing company in Dracut, Massachusetts.

  “And Mother asks again if we can go there over Labor Day,” Honora says.

  “You want a sip?”

  She nods. He hands her his glass and pours liquor into a coffee cup for himself. They are silent, just drinking.

  “I should do the laundry,” she says.

  “I’m going to buy you a washing machine,” Sexton says.

  “Really?”

  He sets the bourbon down and bends to kiss the underside of her chin. “Forget the laundry,” he says.

  The blouse rises above Honora’s arms as if it might fly away. Her clothes make a heap on the floor. Sexton likes to see her naked and has her stand a table length away. It is understood that he will tell her what to do, that she doesn’t have to think about or guess at his desires. As for her own, they are buried deep inside her, bulbs that might one day send up strong shoots through a dark soil.

  Vivian

  “I’m so hot I can’t drink,” Vivian says.

  The air is motionless, a phenomenon she has never observed so close to the water, not in all the years she’s been coming to Fortune’s Rocks. Beyond the beach, the Atlantic lies as flat as a wrinkled sheet. In each tiny wave, Vivian takes hope.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Dickie says.

  “Where would we go?”

  “My house,” he says.

  “Now?”

  “You’ve never seen it,” he says. “There might be a breeze. Something of a breeze, anyway. Normally the place is crawling with workmen, but no one will be there now.”

  “We should say good-bye,” Vivian says. “Whose house is this?”

  She glances into the sitting room of the shingled cottage. Near the French doors, a Spud cigarette is burning a notch in a mahogany desk. Another butt is ground into the Persian rug. Ima Thurston is blotto, hanging over the arm of a silk settee as if she might be sick. Someone ought to put a bucket under her. In a corner, a sober quartet is playing a round of bridge. Laughter, melodious and feminine, returns her attention to the porch.

  “Floyd Holmes, I think,” Dickie says.

  “I don’t even know him.”

  “No, of course you don’t.”

  It is the eighteenth or twentieth party Vivian has been to since arriving at the Highland. Some of the parties have been at the hotel itself, and others, such as this one, have been held at the cottages along the beach and then have moved on to one of the grand houses around the point or to the country club nearer to the center of the village. The guest lists include nearly all of the same people. Cedric Nye and his wife, Natalie, up from Raleigh, North Carolina. The brothers Chadbourne, Nat and Hunt, who invented a ball bearing that has made them millions. Cyril Whittemore, a radio actor whose mid-Atlantic accent is so pitch perfect that it’s impossible to tell which side of the ocean he is from. Dorothy Trafton, whom Vivian knows from Boston, and whom she avoids as best she can because Dorothy was present at a tennis match at which Vivian, thoroughly fed up with Teddy Rice’s arrogance, threw a racquet across the court and dinged Teddy on the ankle. And there’s Harlan Quigley, from New York, and Joshua Cutts, who lives here year round, and Georgia Porter, from Washington (her father is a senator? a representative?), and Arthur Willet, who is said to have millions from a diamond mine in South Africa. His wife, Verna, wears sapphires as a statement of independence.

  Honestly, if only they could all go naked, Vivian thinks. She has on the least amount of clothing she can possibly get away with — a meringue sundress with no back and made of such thin, gauzy material that it’s nearly indecent (only two beige grosgrain ribbons keep it up) — and still tiny rivulets of perspiration trickle from her neck to her breasts. She has already run through all her dresses and will have to start again. Dickie, after an enigmatic absence of two weeks, about which he has so far said little, showed up just the week before, announcing cheerfully that his engagement was broken. The announcement didn’t surprise Vivian, since she and Dickie have been together almost every day since that first morning on the beach, but why they are together remains a mystery to her. They certainly don’t love each other, and she isn’t sure they even like each other very much. They quarrel occasionally when drunk, and once they argued publicly at a dinner party at the Nyes’, an argument that ended when Vivian called him a lush and Dickie deliberately dropped his highball onto the tiles of the Nyes’ kitchen floor, Edinburgh crystal and all. Dickie was profusely apologetic within seconds of the stunt, but she sensed in both of them a certain pleasure in the event. And in that way, she thinks, they are similar types.

  “I’m not sure I’ll like drinking as much when it’s legal,” Vivian says as they make their way around the back of the cottage to Dickie’s car.

  “Oh, not at all,” Dickie says. “Not at all. Imagine being able to walk into a corner grocery store and buy a bottle of gin. It’ll have all the glamour of, I don’t know, Moxie.”

  “It’ll never happen,” Vivian says.

  Dickie starts the engine of his new car, a particularly low-slung Packard. Vivian lays her head back against the seat. The rush of air that the car produces is worth the trip. “Don’t stop,” Vivian says.

  “We could drive to Montreal,” he says.

  He is joking, but the idea appeals to her nevertheless. She imagines the drive north through the night, slipping through the mountains, the air growing cooler and cooler until finally they have to shut the windows. And then they will be in Quebec and no one will speak English and that in itself would be heaven.

  Dickie rounds the point and pulls up to a house clearly in mid repair. It sits on a small bluff overlooking the ocean, just at the juncture between the beach and the rocky point. Even before she emerges from the Packard, Vivian can see the water straight through the house’s windows. Scaffolding makes it hard to discern the contours of the building, but she likes the absence of landscaping. The dunes run right to the foundation.

  “I hope you’re not going to put in any lawn or anything,” Vivian says.

  “Haven’t really got that far,” Dickie says.

  “Leave it wild,” she says. “Plant shrub roses if you must.”

  “Come see the inside,” he says.

  When he opens the car door for her, she takes his arm. Already she can feel a slight breeze. Her dress is an inch too long, and she snags the hem when they step up to a boardwalk that runs across what might normally be a front lawn.

  “When was it built?” she asks as she picks up her skirts. “I’m giving up dresses, by the way,” she says.

  “You’ll look swell in pants,” Dickie says. “It was designed in eighteen ninety-nine for a doctor and his wife, but on the day

&
nbsp; they moved into it, she discovered that he’d been having an affair with a fifteen-year-old girl. A whopping big scandal. Well, for then. Not sure anyone would care now.”

  “Fifteen?” asks Vivian, interrupting. “Oh, people would care.”

  “He was run out of town, and the wife and children moved up to York. A writer, a poet, I think, no one you’ve ever heard of, bought the house for a song. But then he went broke almost immediately and the house was abandoned for years. I’ve had heat put in.” He glances at her. “Thinking of staying on a bit after the summer is over,” he says.

  “Really? Whatever for?”

  “Take my hand,” Dickie says. “Dangerous around here with all the unfinished woodwork. Last week a plumber stepped backward off the upstairs landing. The railing hadn’t been installed yet.”

  “What happened to the plumber?”

  “Died, actually,” Dickie says. “Not right away, but after he’d got to the hospital. Internal injuries or something. Not sure I was ever told.”

  “What happened to the girl?”

  “The fifteen-year-old? I’ve no idea.”

  “Sad,” Vivian says.

  “Everything makes you sad,” Dickie says.

  “You’re sounding kind of petulant tonight.”

  “Really, Viv, I don’t think you give a toss about what happened to some ruined fifteen-year-old girl in eighteen ninety-nine. Or to the plumber, for that matter.”

  She thinks a minute. “I like to know the ends of stories,” she says.

  And suddenly Vivian realizes why she and Dickie are together. He’s the only person who makes her tell the truth. “I like the house empty,” Vivian says as they walk into what appears to be a front room. Sandy, the dog, greets Dickie with a series of back flips. Dickie, after advertising for Sandy’s owner and receiving no response, seems more or less to have inherited the pet. “It’s too bad you have to have furniture,” Vivian says. “The rooms are just right as they are.”